Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

This difficult living, heavy and as if all tied up, moving through that which has been left undone, is like the not-quite-finished walk of the swan. And dying, this slipping away from the ground upon which we stand every day, is his anxious letting himself fall—: into the waters, which receive him gladly and which, as if happily already gone by, draw back under him, wave after wave; while the swan, infinitely calm and self-assured, opener and more magnificent and more serene, allows himself to be drawn on.

Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. 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.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

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. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house —, and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,— you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening...

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

Erst eine Kindheit, grenzenlos und ohne Verzicht und Ziel. O unbewußte Lust. Auf einmal Schrecken, Schranke, Schule, Frohne und Absturtz in Versuchung und Verlust.</p>Trotz. Der Gebogene wird selber Bieger und rächt an anderen, daß er erlag. Geliebt, gefürchtet, Retter, Ringer, Sieger und Überwinder, Schlag auf Schlag. Und dann allein im Weiten, Leichten, Kalten. Doch tief in der errichteten Gestalt ein Atemholen nach dem Ersten, Alten... Da stürzte Gott aus seinem Hinterhalt.

I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make every hour holy. I am too small in the world, and yet not tiny enough just to stand before you like a thing, dark and shrewd. I want my will, and I want to be with my will as it moves towards deed; and in those quiet, somehow hesitating times, when something is approaching, I want to be with those who are wise or else alone.

Think... of the world you carry within you.

That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us: they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys, and as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth — : could we exist without them?

Through such impressions one gathers oneself, wins oneself back from the exacting multiplicity, which speaks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one slowly learns to recognize the very few Things in which something eternal endures that one can love and something solitary that one can gently take part in.

Je weiter ich lebe, desto nötiger scheint es mir, auszuhalten, das ganze Diktat des Daseins bis zum Schluss nachzuschreiben; denn es möchte sein, dass erst der letzte Satz jenes kleine, vielleicht unscheinbare Wort enthält, durch welches alles mühsam Erlernte und Unbegriffene sich gegen einen herrlichen Sinn hinüberkehrt.