Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything terrible is something that needs our love.

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.

I implore those who love me to love my solitude.

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.

It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

That's love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.

Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and great each other.

Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed.

For bel.i.eve me, the more one is, the richer is all one experiences. And whoever wants to have deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey.

You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.

Love the questions, themselves.

Learn to love the questions themselves.

As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer.

Then suddenly you're left all alonewith your body that can't love youand your will that can't save you.

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.

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.

One of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor and innocence.

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.

How he loved and yetwished to leave you: always both, at once.

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes. ... We must, strictly speaking, at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back.

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown.