Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

224 Sourced Quotes

I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me..

Rainer Maria Rilke
And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart....live in the question.

Rainer Maria Rilke
For there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

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

Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

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

Rainer Maria Rilke
Fame is, after all, only the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather around a new name.

Rainer Maria Rilke
One of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor and innocence.

Rainer Maria Rilke
If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

Rainer Maria Rilke
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.

Rainer Maria Rilke
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

Rainer Maria Rilke
The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.

Rainer Maria Rilke
We're never single-minded, unperplexed, like migratory birds.

Rainer Maria Rilke
If the angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner.

Rainer Maria Rilke
I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Let thine shadows upon the sundials fall,
and unleash the winds upon the open fields.

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
Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.

Rainer Maria Rilke
You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait.

Rainer Maria Rilke
We are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us.... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again invisibly, inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

Rainer Maria Rilke