Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

224 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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
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