Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

If the confident animal coming toward us had a mind like ours, the change in him would startle us. But to him his own being is endless, undefined, and without regard for his condition: clear, like his eyes. Where we see future, he sees all, and himself in all, made whole for always.

If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge extends and out a little over the outworks of our surmising, perhaps we should then bear our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new, something unknown, has entered us.

The natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights... Everything is a gestation and then bringing forth.

All of our true relationships, all of our enduring experiences touch upon and pass through everything, Sidie, through life and death. We must live in both, be intimately at home in both.

Nowhere, beloved, can world be but within us. Our life passes in transformation. And the external dwindles away.

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!

In marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage, each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude and thus shows him the greatest faith he can bestow.

Sin is the most wonderfully roundabout path to God

Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one's own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered.

And those, who come together in the night and are twined in quivering pleasure, are performing a serious work and are heaping up sweetness, depth and force for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to express inexpressible ecstasies

To keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your while development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to question that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.

that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them.

Was soll ich mit meinem Munde? Mit meiner Nacht? Mit meinem Tag? Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus, keine Stelle auf der ich lebe

Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the grown-ups? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow.

Wenn der Alltag dir arm erscheint, klage ihn nicht an – klage dich an, daß du nicht stark genug bist, seine Reichtümer zu rufen, denn für den Schaffenden gibt es keine Armut.

Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are.

Great sadnesses … they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.

I believe that almost all our sorrows are moments of tension which we experience as a paralysis, because we no longer hear our estranged feelings living. Because we are alone with the strange thing that has entered into us; because for a moment everything familiar and customary has been taken from us; because we stand in the middle of a crossing where we cannot remain standing.

What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.

Poetry is the past that breaks out in our hearts.

which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that it resumed a new existence in a beyond of color, without any previous memories.

It is still this death which continues inside of me, which works in me, which transforms my heart, which deepens the red of my blood, which bears down heavily on the life that had been ours so that this death becomes a bittersweet drop coursing through my veins and permeating everything, and which ought to be mine forever.

I always feel: when one person is indebted to another for something very special, that indebtedness should remain a secret between just the two of them.