Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

Früher wusste man (oder vielleicht ahnte man es), dass man den Tod in sich hatte wir die Frucht den Kern. Die Kinder hatten einen kleinen und die Erwachsenen einen großen. Die Frauen hatten ihn im Schoß und die Männer in der Brust. Den hatte man, und das gab einem eine eigentümliche Würde und einen stillen Stolz.

How much there is to suffer. When was time enough to pay attention to our lighter emotions? And still I recognize, better than most others who will be resurrected, what blessedness is.

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

Now you feel how nothing clings to you; your vast shell reaches into endless space, and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow. Illuminated in your infinite peace, a billion stars go spinning through the night, blazinghigh above your head. But IN you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.

Ein Jeder engel ist schrecklich.

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

Read as little as possible of literary criticism — such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view.

His smile was so soft and fine: like gleaming old ivory, like homesickness, like a Christmas snowfall in the dark village, like turquoise around which many pearls are fashioned, like moonlight on a favorite book. -in Mädchenmelancholie (Girls' melancholy)

Los pájaros nos traspasan en vuelo silencioso.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between contradictions ... for the god wants to know himself in you.

God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.

That's when I want you— you knower of my emptiness, you unspeaking partner to my sorrow— that's when I need you, — Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Ich bin derselbe noch, der kniete," Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God , trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.

there is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving. .

If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.

Who shows a child, just as they are? Who sets it in its constellation, and gives the measure of distance into its hand? Who makes a child's death out of grey bread, that hardens, - or leaves it inside its round mouth like the core of a shining apple? Killers are easy to grasp. But this: death, the whole of death, before life, to hold it so softly, and not live in anger, cannot be expressed.

When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.

It is true that many young people who do not love rightly, who simply surrender themselves and leave no room for aloneness, experience the depressing feeling of failure.

So now my prayer is this: You, my own deep soul, trust me. I will not betray you. My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Dann bete du, wie es dich dieser Iehrt," Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God , trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own.

No, my life is not this precipitous hour through which you see me passing at a run.

Works of art are born of those who confront danger, who go to the limit of an experience, to a point beyond which no human can go. The farther one ventures, the more distinctive, the more personal, the more unique life becomes.

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are really princesses, waitiing for us to be handsome and brave; and all the terrifying things are really helpless things, waiting for us to help them.

And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.