Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer

If there is nothing in common between you and other people, try being close to things, they will not desert you; there are the nights still and the winds that go through the trees and across many lands; among things and with the animals everything is still happening, in which you may participate; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad like that and happy.

You should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it…We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

So badly does one live, because one always comes incomplete into the present, inept and scatter-brained.

There is no measuring with time, not even a year matters, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: to neither reckon nor count; to ripen like the tree, which does not rush its sap, and stands firm in the storms of spring, without anxiety that summer may not come after. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there, as if eternity lay before them, so carelessly silent and vast. I learn it daily, learn it with pain, am grateful for it: Patience is all!

I can see myself lying in my little high-sided bed, not sleeping and somehow vaguely intimating that that was how life would be: full of special things that are only intended for one person and cannot be told of.

Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.

Ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you really have lost God? Is it not rather, that you have never yet possessed him? For when should that have been? Do you not believe that a child can hold him, him whom men bear only with effort and whose weight compresses the old? Do you believe that anyone who really has him could lose him like a little stone, or do you not think rather that whoever had him could only be lost by him?

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.

Winning does not tempt that man, This is how he grows, by being defeated decisively, by greater and greater beings.' The Man Watching ~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

With regard to any such disquisition, review or introduction, trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights. Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated.

There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer.

To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one's own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one's creative work.

Learning-time is always a long, secluded time..

Do not look for answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

In later years it would sometimes happen that I'd wake up at night and see the stars so real in the sky and so meaningful in their course, and couldn't understand how anyone could bring themselves to miss so much of the world.

Wenn du der Träumer bist, bin ich dein Traum. Doch wenn du wachen willst, bin ich dein Wille

Amar também é bom: pois o amor é difícil. Ter amor, de uma pessoa por outra, talvez seja a coisa mais difícil que nos foi dada, a mais extrema, a derradeira prova e provação, o trabalho para o qual qualquer outro trabalho é apenas uma preparação. Por isso as pessoas jovens, iniciantes em tudo, ainda não podem amar: precisam aprender o amor.

Please don't think that the person trying to comfort you is living untroubled among these simple, quiet words that sometimes do you good. His own life has plenty of trouble and sadness; it lags far behind his words. And yet, were that not true, he would never have been able to find them.

A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.

Me pregunto si estoy lo suficientemente sereno y maduro como para iniciar el diario que te quiero llevar de vuelta a casa...

No fundo é esta a única coragem que se exige de nós: sermos corajosos diante do que é mais estranho, mais maravilhoso e mais inexplicável entre tudo com que nos deparamos.

And surely of all the stars that perished long ago, one still exists. I think that I know which one it is-- which one, at the end of its beam in the sky, stands like a white city . . .

They wished to flower, and flowering is being beautiful: but we wish to ripen, and that means being dark and taking pains.