Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.

If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. - Mitchell translation

It is also good to love: because love is difficult.

It is nothing but a breath, the void.

If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys.

Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!

Look, I am living. On what? Neither the childhood nor future/ grows any smaller...Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.

Long you must suffer, knowing not what, until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit your suffering's taste comes forth in you. Then you will love almost instantly what's tasted. No one will ever talk you out of it.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.

So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.

The grief, too, passes.

And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad.

We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.

And so I check myself and swallow the luring call of dark sobs. Alas, whom can we turn to in our need? Not angels, not humans, and the sly animals see at once how little at home we are in the interpreted world. That leaves us some tree on a hillside, on which our eyes fasten day after day; leaves us yesterday's street and the coddled loyalty of an old habit that liked it here, stayed on, and never left.

I would like to step out of my heart And go walking beneath the enormous sky.

I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.

And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.

And if I have anything else to say to you it is this: do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did.

Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.

Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.

Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.