Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

find enough patience in yourself to endure, and enough simplicity to believe; that you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult, and in particular your solitude. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, every time.

I want to encourage you in your pain so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life, like everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength.

The carriages drove right through me, and hurrying people did not swerve aside for me and ran over me full of contempt, as over a bad place in which stale water has collected....O what a world it is! Pieces, pieces of people, parts of animals, remains of finished things, and everything still on the move, driving about as if in an uncanny wind, carried and carrying, falling and catching themselves up in their fall.

How dear will you be to me then, you nights of affliction. Why couldn't I kneel more deeply and accept you, inconsolable sisters, or lose myself more freely in your loosened hair. We spendthrifts of sorrows. How we scan beyond them ahead into sad duration to see if perhaps they might have an end. But they are truly our winter-hardy foliage, the dark green of our life's meaning, one season of our secret year—, not only time—, but also place, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

Do you see . . . So this is what one ought to be capable of at some point. Not to wait (which is what has been happening until now) for powerful things and good days to turn you into something but to preempt them and to be it yourself already: this is what one ought to be capable of at some point.

love then is what my hands attempt to grasp because I want to say a prayer whose sounds my burning mouth, my lips, cannot bring forth …

I wanted only to advise you to progress quietly and seriously in your evolvement. You could greatly interfere with that process if you look outward and expect to obtain answers from the outside—answers which only your innermost feeling in your quietest hour can perhaps give you.

Everything that makes you into more than you have ever been, in your best moments, is right.

Here is no thoroughly mature and clean sex world, but one that is not sufficiently human, that is only male, is heat, intoxication and restlessness, and laden with the old prejudices and arrogances with which man has disfigured and burdened love. Because he loves as man only, not as human being, for this reason there is in his sexual feeling something narrow, seeming wild, spiteful, time-bound, uneternal, that diminishes his art and makes it ambiguous and doubtful.

There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words: all we end up with there is more or less felicitous misunderstandings. Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe;

We were once, she says, a great clan, we laments. Our forefathers worked mines up in those tall mountains; among humans occasionally a cut stone of primal sorrow turns up, or a slag of petrified wrath from an ancient volcano. Yes, those came from up there. We were rich once.

You are looking outward, which, now above all, you should not do. No one can advise and assist you, no one. There is only one way: go into yourself. Seek out the reason that commands you to write; discover if it has stretched out its roots into the deepest part of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if it were forbidden you to write.

He can't take it all in, dazed from early death. But their looking flashes an owl from behind the rim of the crown. And brushing downwards slowly along the great cheek, the one of ripest roundness, the bird limns into the dead youth's new hearing, across a double open page, the indescribable contour. And, higher, the stars.

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.

Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility forming and creating, as a particularly happy and pure way of living.

Ich will wie ein Kind im Krankenzimmer Einsam, mit heimlichem Lächeln, leise, Leise – Tage und Träume bauen.

Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work.

To love is good, for love is hard. Love between one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation.

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves liked locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.

y allí donde existía una morada estable se presenta una construcción imaginaria, forma que depende sólo del pensamiento —como erigida toda y solamente en la imaginación.

Il vostro più intimo accadere è degno di tutto il vostro amore.

Don't you see how everything that happens is always a beginning again, and could it not be His beginning, given that beginnings are in themselves always so beautiful?

E tutto congiura a tacere di noi, in parte come vergogna, o forse come speranza indicibile.