Rainer Maria Rilke - People Quotes

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There is probably no point in my going into your questions now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner lives into harmony or about all the other thing that oppress you - : is just what I have already said: just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.

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

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
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Rainer Maria Rilke
You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone, and then no one outside learns of you. But the darkness pulls in everything: shapes and fires, animals and myself, how easily it gathers them! - powers and people - and it is possible a great energy is moving near me. I have faith in nights.

Rainer Maria Rilke
There are quite a number of people in the reading-room; but one is not aware of them. They are inside the books. They move, sometimes, within the pages like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

Rainer Maria Rilke
The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them. But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence — then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Young people -it is obvious -cannot achieve such a relationship, but they can, if they understand their life properly, grow up slowly to such happiness and prepare themselves for it. They must not forget, when they love, that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love- must learn love, and that like all learning wants peace, patience, and composure.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.

Rainer Maria Rilke
People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion, and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.

Rainer Maria Rilke
I am so afraid of people's words.
They describe so distinctly everything:
And this they call dog and that they call house,
here the start and there the end. I worry about their mockery with words,
they know everything, what will be, what was;
no mountain is still miraculous;
and their house and yard lead right up to God. I want to warn and object: Let the things be!
I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.
But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.
That's how you kill.

Rainer Maria Rilke