Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

I have thought it best to group all the explanations which any letters of Rilke necessarily involve, at the end of the book and out of the way; indeed, no harm will be done if the ordinary reader ignores them altogether, and enjoys the letters simply for what they are. But the student will probably care to pursue further some of the astonishing wealth of ideas which the poet here raises.

While they mean to please each other, they touch each other only impatiently and in a dominating manner. And in the effort to escape from the intolerable and unbearable condition of their confusion, they commit the greatest mistake that can be made within a relationship: they become impatient.

Your smile more enduring, when it illuminates your sorrow.

Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you?

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.

I think there was a conflict, a mutual struggle between the two procedures of, first, looking and confidently perceiving, and then of appropriating and making personal use of what has been perceived; that the two, perhaps as a result of becoming conscious, would immediately start opposing each other, talking out loud, as it were, and go on perpetually interrupting and contradicting each other.

Perhaps every terror is, in its deepest essence, something that needs our recognition or help.

As coisas estão longe de ser todas tão tangíveis e dizíveis quanto se nos pretenderia fazer crer; a maior parte dos acontecimentos é inexprimível e ocorre num espaço em que nenhuma palavra pisou.

But it is over now; I have survived it.

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate. From images that are full, the spirit plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled; there are no lakes till eternity. Here, falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion into the guessed-at, and onward.

L'amore consiste in questo, che due solitudini si proteggono a vicenda, si toccano, si salutano.

There exist relationships that must amount to a very great and almost unbearable happiness, but they can take place only between people blessed with abundance and between individuals each one of whom is rich, focused, and mindful; they can be united only by two expansive, deep, and individual worlds.

The only journey is the journey within.

We often decide in advance how we will respond to something rather than wait for the experience to play itself out according to its proper speed.

Deja que todo te suceda: la belleza y el terror. Solo sigue adelante. Ningún sentimiento es definitivo

You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself.

There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself...Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.

Believe me, life is right in all cases.

if a sadness arises before you, greater than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and the shadows of clouds, passes over your hands and over all you do, you must suppose that something is acting upon you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand. It will not let you fall.

keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your

do not believe that he who is seeking to comfort you lives effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much trouble and sadness and remains far behind you. But were it otherwise, he could never have found those words.

Oh Malte, we just go on living, and it seems to me that everyone is distracted and busy and no one pays proper attention as we go along. As if a meteor were to fall and no one sees it and no one has made a wish. Never forget to wish for something, Malte.

Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise in us invisible?—Isn't your dream one day to be invisible?

And if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away.