Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.

No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. (Siehe, wir lieben nicht, wie die Blumen, aus einem einzigen Jahr; uns steigt, wo wir lieben, unvordenklicher Saft in die Arme.)

Every angel is terrible.

For there clings to him something that often overwhelms us— memory, a recollection that whatever we're striving for now was once closer and truer, and that its union with us was incredibly tender. Here, everything is distance; There, is was breath.

All who seek you test you. And those who find you bind you to image and gesture. I would rather sense you as the earth senses you. In my ripening ripens what you are. I need from you no tricks to prove you exist. Time, I know, is other than you. No miracles, please. Just let your laws become clearer from generation to generation.

And yet they are in us, those who have long since passed away, as natural disposition, as burden on our destiny, as blood that throbs, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.

If one think he can live without writing, perhaps he should not write at all.

O stars, Isn't it from you that the lover's desire for the face Of his beloved arises? Doesn't his secret insight Into her pure features come from the pure constellations?

Those who come together in the night time and entwine in swaying delight perform a serious work and gather up sweetness, depth and strength for the song of some poet that is to be, who will rise to tell of unspeakable bliss.

Seulement la terre qui obéit, sait bien qu'elle tourne en rond, tandis que nous vers l'infini nous précipitons. Translation: But the obedient Earth well knows that she moves round and round, whereas we hurtle down toward infinity.

But this press of time—take it as a little thing next to what endures. All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.

It is good to hear all of this and to see it and to seize it, not to become numb toward it but on the contrary: everything is to be felt in countless ways in all its variations yet without losing ourselves to it.

particularly in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them.

Take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

Don't you see that everything that happens is always a beginning again.

Amint észrevettem, lehalkítottam lépteimet. Amikor a szegények gondolkoznak, nem szabad zavarni Å'ket. Talán mégiscsak eszükbe jut.

Don't petals of soft words float upon your blood?

Continue to believe that with your feeling and with your work you take part in what is greatest. The more strongly you cultivate this belief inside of you, the more it will give rise to reality and world.

O tempo não é uma medida. Um ano não conta, dez anos não representam nada. Ser artista não significa contar, é crescer como a árvore que não apressa a sua seiva e resiste, serena, aos grandes ventos da primavera, sem temer que o verão possa não vir. O verão há de vir. Mas só vem para aqueles que sabem esperar, tão sossegados como se tivessem na frente a eternidade.

Only in the realm of Praising should Lament walk, the naiad of the wept-for fountain, watching over the stream of our complaint, to keep it clear upon the very stone that bears the arch of triumph and the altar.—

I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so only because I seldom hear you breathe

I'm learning how to see. I don't know what the reason is, but everything enters into me more deeply and no longer stops at the point where it used to come to an end. I have an inner self that I knew nothing about. Now everything goes into it. I don't know what happens there.

You don't survive in me because of memories; nor are you mine because of a lovely longing's strength. What does make you present is the ardent detour that a slow tenderness traces in my blood. I do not need to see you appear; being born sufficed for me to lose you a little less.