Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name.

That is the principal thing: not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being in the mood, but always forcibly to convert it into all things.

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

The gnarled fidelity of an old habit.

Have patience with everything unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves. It is possible to live and not know.

Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love.

we want it visible to showwhen even the most visible joy will reveal itselfonly when we have transformed it within.there's nowhere, my love, the world can existexpect within.

Nothing in this world can one imagine beforehand, not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen.

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.

Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again.

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.

Nothing in the world can one imagine beforehand, not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen.

She who reconciles the ill-matched threadsOf her life, and weaves them gratefullyInto a single cloth – It's she who drives the loudmouths from the hallAnd clears it for a different celebration.

Of course everything is blooming most recklessly: if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.

"Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems."

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

I am too alone in the world and not alone enough to make every moment holy.

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.

A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.