Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

I have faith in nights.

The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection.

Strange / to wish wishes no longer. / Strange / to see things / that seemed to / belong together / floating in every / direction.

Jubilation knows and Longing grants — only Lament still learns; with girlish hands she counts the ancient evil through the nights. But suddenly, unpracticed and askant, she lifts one of our voice's constellations Into the sky unclouded by her breath.

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 into magnificent sense.

You, still the squanderers of the empty hall — when the twilight comes, wide as woods… And the chandelier, like a sixteen-pointer, vaults where nothing can set foot.

Love at first has nothing to do with unfolding, abandon and uniting with another person (for what would be the sense in a union of what is unrefined and unfinished, still second order?); for the individual it is a grand opportunity to mature, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for another's sake; it is a great immoderate demand made upon the self, something that singles him out and summons him to vast designs.

How he loved and yet wished to leave you: always both, at once.

To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil.

Being dead filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit suffused with its own mystery and sweetness, she was filled with her vast death, which was so new, she could not understand that it had happened.

Préfères-tu, rose, être l'ardente compagne de nos transports présents? Est-ce les souvenir qui davantage te gagne lorsqu'un bonheur se reprend? Tant de fois je t'ai vue, heureuse et sèche, - chaque pétale un linceul - dans un coffret odorant, à côté d'une mèche, ou dans un livre aimé qu'on relira seul.

We are unspeakably alone.

How good it is to be among reading people. Why are they not always like that? You can go up to one of them and touch him lightly; he feels nothing. And if in rising, you chance to bump lightly against a neighbor and excuse yourself, he nods toward the side from which he hears your voice, his face turns toward you and does not see you, and his hair is like that of a man asleep. How comforting that is.

Tout ce qui nous émeut, tu le partages. Mais ce qui t'arrive, nous l'ignorons. Il faudrait être cent papillons pour lire toutes tes pages. Il y en a d'entre vous qui sont comme des dictionnaires; ceux qui les cueillent ont envie de faire relier toutes ces feuilles. Moi, j'aime les roses épistolaires.

Piously we produce our images of you till they stand around you like a thousand walls. And when our hearts would simply open, our fervent hands hide you.

Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour

Whether it be the singing of a lamp or the voice of a storm, whether it be the breath of an evening or the groan of the ocean — whatever surrounds you, a broad melody always wakes behind you, woven out of a thousand voices, where there is room for your own solo only here and there. To know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody.

She followed slowly and she needed time, as though some long ascent were not yet by; and yet: as though, when she had ceased to climb, she would no longer merely walk, but fly.

Vielleicht sind gewisse meiner neulich ausgesprochenen Bedenken sehr übertrieben; so viel, wie ich mich kenne, scheint mir sicher, daß, wenn man mir meine Teufel austriebe, auch meinen Engeln ein kleinen, ein ganz kleiner (sagen wir) Schrecken geschähe, - und - fühlen Sie - gerade darauf darf ich es auf keinen Preis ankommen lassen.

This isn't how sickness was in childhood. A postponement. An excuse to grow up.

How we squander our hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end. Though they are really our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, one season in our inner year—, not only a season in time—, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.

Sana daha önce söylemiÅŸ miydim? Görmeyi öÄŸreniyorum. Evet, yeni baÅŸlad?m. Henüz pek o kadar iyi deÄŸil ama elimden geleni yapaca??m.

Even when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: It's over---, even when from the stage a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me, even when not one silent ancestor sits beside me anymore---not a woman, not even the boy with the brown squint-eye: I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch.

Truly being here is glorious.