Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

224 Sourced Quotes

Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed.

Rainer Maria Rilke
We wasters of sorrows! How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our interior year.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.

Rainer Maria Rilke
And one of the things I find most moving is the way people with infirmities manage to embrace Life, and from the cool flowers by the wayside reach conclusions about the vast splendour of its great gardens. They can, if their souls' strings are finely tuned, arrive with much less effort at the feeling of eternity; for everything we do, they may dream. And precisely where our deeds end, theirs begin to bear fruit.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Fig tree, how long it's been full meaning for me, the way you almost entirely omit to flower and into the seasonably-resolute fruit uncelebratedly thrust your purest secret. Like the tube of a fountain, your bent bough drives the sap downwards and up: and it leaps from its sleep, scarce waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.

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
The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Who sets him in a constellation and puts the measuring-stick of distance in his hands?

Rainer Maria Rilke
Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

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
Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

Rainer Maria Rilke
To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

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

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

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

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

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 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