Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

Moving Forward The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. It seems that things are more like me now, that I can see farther into paintings. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my sense, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven, out of the oak, and in the ponds broken off from the sky my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Contre qui, rose, avez-vous adopté ces épines? Votre joie trop fine vous a-t-elle forcée de devenir cette chose armée? Mais de qui vous protège cette arme exagérée? Combien d'ennemis vous ai-je enlevés qui ne la craignaient point? Au contraire, d'été en automne, vous blessez les soins qu'on vous donne.

Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don't know what work it is these states are performing within you?

What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great.

For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself.

De ton rêve trop plein, fleur en dedans nombreuse, mouillée comme une pleureuse, tu te penches sur le matin. Tes douces forces qui dorment, dans un désir incertain, développent ces tendres formes entre joues et seins.

I don't invent you at sadly cooled-off places from which you've gone away; even your not being there is warm with you and more real and more than a privation. Longing leads out too often into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when, for all I know, your influence falls on me, gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

Rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and clam before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.

La rose complète J'ai une telle conscience de ton être, rose complète, que mon consentement te confond avec mon cÅ"ur en fête. Je te respire comme si tu étais, rose, toute la vie, et je me sens l'ami parfait d'une telle amie.

Je te vois, rose, livre entrebâillé, qui contient tant de pages de bonheur détaillé qu'on ne lira jamais. Livre-mage, qui s'ouvre au vent et qui peut être lu les yeux fermés ..., dont les papillons sortent confus d'avoir eu les mêmes idées.

There is but one solitude, and that is great and not easy to bear, and to almost everybody come hours when they would gladly exchange it for any sort of intercourse, however banal and cheap, for the semblance of some slight accord with the first comer, with the unworthiest... But perhaps those are the very hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of springtimes.

like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow.

Things are not as easy to understand and say as we might prefer to believe; most events are inexpressible, happening in a space where no word has ever set foot, and most inexpressible of all are works of art, mysterious existences, whose life continues as ours passes away.

Though he works and worries, the farmer never reaches down to where the seed turns into summer. The earth grants.

C'est pourtant nous qui t'avons proposé de remplir ton calice. Enchantée de cet artifice, ton abondance l'avait osé. Tu étais assez riche, pour devenir cent fois toi-même en une seule fleur; c'est l'état de celui qui aime ... Mais tu n'as pas pensé ailleurs.

The future stands firm... but we move in infinite space.

There is no more wretched prison than the fear of hurting someone who loves you.

El amor de un ser humano por otro, es posiblemente la prueba más difícil para cada uno de nosotros.

I am still soft, and I can be like wax in your hands. Take me, give me a form, finish me.

For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

Une rose seule, c'est toutes les roses et celle-ci: l'irremplaçable, le parfait, le souple vocable encadré par le texte des choses. Comment jamais dire sans elle ce que furent nos espérances, et les tendres intermittences, dans la partance continuelle.

T'appuyant, fraîche claire rose, contre mon oeil fermé -, on dirait mille paupières superposées contre la mienne chaude. Mille sommeils contre ma feinte sous laquelle je rôde dans l'odorant labyrinthe.

It is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it... that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it...To love is good, too: love being difficult.

Rose, toute ardente et pourtant claire, que l'on devrait nommer reliquaire de Sainte-Rose ..., rose qui distribue cette troublante odeur de sainte nue. Rose plus jamais tentée, déconcertante de son interne paix; ultime amante, si loin d'Ève, de sa première alerte -, rose qui infiniment possède la perte.