Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

Works of art are indeed always products of having been in danger, of having gone to the very end in an experience, to where man can go no further.

In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.

Fame is, after all, only the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather around a new name.

Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.

Fame — the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name.

He was a poet and hated the approximate.

Us the most fleeting of all. Just once,everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too,once. And never again. But thishaving been once, though only once,having been once on earth—can it ever be canceled?

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

Who has no house now will not build him one.

We're never single-minded, unperplexed, like migratory birds.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.

And even 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?

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.

When I saw others straining toward God, I did not understand it, for though I may have had him less than they did, there was no one blocking the way between him and me, and I could reach his heart easily. It is up to him, after all, to have us, our part consists of almost solely in letting him grasp us.

A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.

I am alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make every hour holy...

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.

Yes, everything that is truly seen must become a poem.

Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.

At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.

Do continue to believe that with your feeling and your work you are taking part in the greatest the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.