Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

224 Sourced Quotes

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens.... Superabundant existence wells in my heart.

Rainer Maria Rilke
The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.

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
A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.

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
We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.

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
And you suddenly know: It was here! You pull yourself together, and there stands an irrevocable year of anguish and vision and prayer.

Rainer Maria Rilke
We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.

Rainer Maria Rilke
To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.

Rainer Maria Rilke
But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

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

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

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

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
Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling... it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.

Rainer Maria Rilke