Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.

The future must enter you long before it happens.

There is time only to work slowly There is no time not to love

I believe that nothing that is real can pass away.

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.

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.

The most visible joy can only reveal itself to us when we've transformed it, within.

You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.

Truly it is glorious, our being here.

I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and great each other.

So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.

Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.

To be an artist means not to compute or count.

You must change your life.

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.

Go into yourself. Dig into yourself for a deep answer

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you.

Love the questions, themselves.

We are the bees of the invisible. We madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

In the depths all becomes law.

Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.

Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?

More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Learn to love the questions themselves.

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.

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

Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.

Now for some heartwork.

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

For bel.i.eve me, the more one is, the richer is all one experiences. And whoever wants to have deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey.

Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!

As the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.

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.

Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.

Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches?

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate.

Earth, is not this what you will: in us to rise up invisible? Is it, O Earth, not your dream once to be wholly invisible? Earth! Invisible! What, if not change, is your desperate mission?

As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

And when suddenly the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry, uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ – she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?

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.

It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)

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.

Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out.

Draw near to Nature. Then try like some first human being to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

The artist's task consists of making one thing of many, and a world from the smallest part of a thing.

Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer.