Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom.

Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation.​ You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold​, comes at long last over everyone.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.

the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.

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.

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.

May you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people.

Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.

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.

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.

What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things

Everything in the world of things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.

. . . denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben andern. (... for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.)

Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

You must think that something is happening upon you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.

We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash.

To be here is immense.

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise.

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

Live the questions now.

No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.

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

What we do battle with is so small, what battles us is so large.

We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important.

If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

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.

Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.

Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.

What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.

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

Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act.

Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us.

All professions are... filled with demands.

Life is cut to allow for growth ... one may vigorously put on weight before one fills it out entirely.

I implore those who love me to love my solitude.

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

Those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.

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

Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.

Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath?

And you suddenly know: It was here! You pull yourself together, and there stands an irrevocable year of anguish and vision and prayer.

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

... be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.