Quotes from Ranier Maria Rilke

My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.

Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all, love them.

Since I've learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.

You needed your whole self; and so you went and broke yourself, out of its grip, in pieces,painfully, because your need was great.

I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish

For it is not inertia alone that makes human relationships so unspeakably monotonous and devoid of renewal in one case after another, it is the fear of any new, unforeseeable experience for which one does not feel prepared.

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. Ranier Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet