Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

224 Sourced Quotes

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rainer Maria Rilke
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

Rainer Maria Rilke
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.

Rainer Maria Rilke
There is probably no point in my going into your questions now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner lives into harmony or about all the other thing that oppress you - : is just what I have already said: just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rainer Maria Rilke
He [Cézanne] reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.

Rainer Maria Rilke
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you. And without feet I can make my way to you, without a mouth I can swear your name. Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you with my heart as with a hand. Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat. And if you consume my brain with fire, I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Lord, it is time. The summer was very big. Lay thy shadow on the sundials, and on the meadows let the winds go loose. Command the last fruits that they shall be full; give them another two more southerly days, press them on to fulfillment and drive the last sweetiness into the heavenly wine.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House. Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window,— possibly: Pillar, Tower?

Rainer Maria Rilke
Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath?

Rainer Maria Rilke
The most visible joy can only reveal itself to us when we've transformed it, within.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Rainer Maria Rilke
May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

Rainer Maria Rilke
All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.

Rainer Maria Rilke
I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk only on feelings. That faces upward and in its mirror receives heavenly roads, which travel along themselves. That has learned to walk upon water when it scoops, that walks upon wells, transfiguring every path. That steps into other hands, changes those that are like it into a landscape: wanders and arrives within them, fills them with arrival.

Rainer Maria Rilke
A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Rainer Maria Rilke
I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false...

Rainer Maria Rilke
As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build...

Rainer Maria Rilke
One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next moment a star!

Rainer Maria Rilke
The artist's task consists of making one thing of many, and a
world from the smallest part of a thing.

Rainer Maria Rilke
For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Rainer Maria Rilke
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

Rainer Maria Rilke