Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

We of the here-and-now are not for a moment satisfied in the world of time, nor are we bound in it; we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. In that vast open world, all beings are ? one cannot say contemporaneous, for the very fact that time has ceased determines that they all are . ?from letter to Witold Hulewicz (November 13, 1929)

gal mirusieji yra tie, kurie iš?jo pam?styti apie gyvenim?.

It is a blessed moment of inner life when one decides or resolves from now on to love with all one's strength and unflinchingly that which one fears the most, that which has made us—according to our own measure—suffer too much. Don't you believe that once such a decision has been made, the word "separation" is nothing but a name stripped of all meaning

To be loved means to be ablaze. To love is: to cast a light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to last. (Letters on Life)

And while I am completely engulfed in my sadness, I am happy to sense that you exist, beautiful one. I am happy to have flung myself without fear into your beauty just as a bird flings itself into space. I am happy, dear, to have walked with steady faith on the waters of our uncertainty all the way to that island which is your heart and where pain blossoms.

I believe that almost all our sadnesses are periods of tautening that we experience as numbers because we can no longer hear the stirring of our feelings, which have become foreign to us.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.

lo que llamamos destino no entra en nosotros desde el exterior, sino que emerge de nosotros.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love... Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.

Even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue.

Happily, somewhere in the heart of darkness, my optimism prevailed.

But only someone who is ready for anything and rules nothing out, not even the most enigmatic things, will experience the relationship with another as a living thing and will himself live his own existence to the full.

have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and try to cherish the questions themselves... Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them... Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer.

Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.

I am learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way. I do not know what happens there.

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 calm 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. Seek yourself some sort of simple and loyal community with them, which need not necessarily change as you yourself become different and again different; love in them life in an unfamiliar form

patience is the art of courting the future.

Almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.

are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is all!

Tal vez todo lo que nos asusta es, en su más profunda esencia, algo indefenso que requiere nuestro amor.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere, turned toward the world of objects, never outward. It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down. We rearrange it, then break down ourselves. (Und wir: Zuschauer, immer, uberall, dem allen zugewandt und nie hinaus! Uns uberfullts. Wir ordnens. es zerfallt. Wir ordnens wieder und zerfallen selbst.)

We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it holds terrors they are our terrors.

most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod, and more unutterable than them all are works of art, whose life endures by the side of our own that passes away.