Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

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She moves the way clocks move. And on her face, as on a clock dial which someone shines a light onto at night, a strange, briefly shown hour stands: a terrifying hour, in which someone dies.

Rainer Maria Rilke
The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping is nothing without the continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousandfold assent from Things and animals... beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones.

Rainer Maria Rilke
In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.

Rainer Maria Rilke
That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes.... We must, strictly speaking, at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back.

Rainer Maria Rilke
But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up of thousands of things, we never fully know what.

Rainer Maria Rilke
The moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

Rainer Maria Rilke
I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Rainer Maria Rilke
The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,as if orchards were dying high in space.Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."And tonight the heavy earth is fallingaway from all other stars in the loneliness.We're all falling. This hand here is falling.And look at the other one. It's in them all.And yet there is Someone, whose handsinfinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.

Rainer Maria Rilke
It almost seems as if autumn were the true creator, more creative than the spring, which is too even-toned, more creative when it comes with its will-to-change and shatters the much too ready-made, self-satisfied and really almost bourgeois-complacent image of summer.

Rainer Maria Rilke
I am like a child who awakes At the light, so safe and secureFree from night's fears when dawn breaks, In Thee I am ever secure.

Rainer Maria Rilke
You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
That is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
As it divides and rejoins behind you.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
Too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Rainer Maria Rilke
I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!

Rainer Maria Rilke
Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

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
Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism.

Rainer Maria Rilke
If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys.

Rainer Maria Rilke
I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.

Rainer Maria Rilke
He who understands one thing understands everything, for the same laws are in all.

Rainer Maria Rilke
My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.

Rainer Maria Rilke
To be in circumstances that are working upon us, that from time to time place us in front of great natural Things - that is all we need.

Rainer Maria Rilke
That Is Longing: To dwell in the flux of things,
To have no home in the present.
And These Are Wishes: gentle dialogues
Of the poor hours with eternity.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.

Rainer Maria Rilke
If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.

Rainer Maria Rilke
We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.

Rainer Maria Rilke
They, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.

Rainer Maria Rilke