Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunny one, at the end of the path which I've only just begun. So we are grasped, by that which we could not gra… - Rainer Maria Rilke

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Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunny one, at the end of the path which I've only just begun. So we are grasped, by that which we could not grasp, at such great distance, so fully manifest— and it changes us, even when we do not reach it, into something that, hardly sensing it, we already are; a sign appears, echoing our own sign... But what we sense is the falling winds.

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About Rainer Maria Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, generally considered the German language's greatest poet of the 20th century. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and anxiety. These themes position him as a transitional figure between traditional and modernist writers.

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Also Known As

Alternative Names: René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke René Maria Cäsar Rilke Rainer Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke Li-erh-kʻo Rainer Maria Rielke René Rilke Rainer Mariyah Rilḳeh Rainŏ Maria Rilkʻe Reiner Marie Rilke Rene Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke Rene Rilke

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Additional quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet 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. Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit?

The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense.

How shall I hold on to my soul, so that it does not touch yours? How shall I lift it gently up over you on to other things? I would so very much like to tuck it away among long lost objects in the dark, in some quiet, unknown place, somewhere which remains motionless when your depths resound. And yet everything which touches us, you and me, takes us together like a single bow, drawing out from two strings but one voice. On which instrument are we strung? And which violinist holds us in his hand? O sweetest of songs.

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