Quotes About Life

And you wait. You wait for the one thing that will change your life, make it more than it is— something wonderful, exceptional, stones awakening, depths opening to you. In the dusky bookstalls old books glimmer gold and brown. You think of lands you journeyed through, of paintings and a dress once worn by a woman you never found again. And suddenly you know: that was enough. You rise and there appears before you in all its longings and hesitations the shape of what you lived.

confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you.

The main thing was to be living. That was the main thing.

There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words: all we end up with there is more or less felicitous misunderstandings. Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.

I believe in old age; to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us. And then one day to be old and still be quite far from understanding everything - no, but to begin, but to love, but to suspect, but to be connected to what is remote and inexpressible, all the way up into the stars. (Letters on Life)

Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.

Through love and through death, our innate ability to transform the loss of control is activated to bring forth a deeper awareness of life.

to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question

just like the moon, life surely has a side that is perpetually turned away from us and which is not its opposite but adds to its perfection and completeness, to the truly intact and full sphere of being.

The more one is, the more abundant is everything one experiences. If you want to have a deep love in your life, you must save up for it and collect and gather honey.

Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many) lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it.

Oh trees of life, when will your winter come? We're not in tune. Not like migratory birds. Outmoded, late, in haste, we force ourselves on winds which let us down upon indifferent ponds. Though we've had to learn how flowering is fading, somewhere lions still roam, unaware, in their majesty, of any weakness. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from the "Fourth Elegy," Duino Elegies . Trans. by David Young. (W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition, June 17, 2006) Originally published 1923.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.

Der Tod ist groß. Wir sind die Seinen lachenden Munds. Wenn wir uns mitten im Leben meinen, wagt er zu weinen mitten in uns.

Whatever happens, your life will find its own paths from that point on, and that they may be good, productive and far-reaching is something I wish for you more than I can say.

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life; as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small and in the vast you vastly yield yourself. The wondrous game that power plays with Things is to move in such submission through the world: groping in roots and growing thick in trunks and in treetops like a rising from the dead.

Just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rainer Maria Rilke

You have to live within yourself and think of all of life, all of its millions of possibilities, openings, and futures in relation to which there exists nothing that is past or has been lost. (Letters on Life)

Seek out some simple and true community with them, of the kind that need not change, even when you yourself become more and more different; love life in them, in an unfamiliar form, and be kind to those who are aging, who fear the very solitude in which you trust.

Eskiden insan biliyordu (ya da belki de seziyordu) ki, meyvenin çekirdeÄŸini ta??mas? gibi, ölümü kendi içinde ta??maktad?r.

THE SWAN This laboring of ours with all that remains undone, as if still bound to it, is like the lumbering gait of the swan. And then our dying — releasing ourselves from the very ground on which we stood — is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself into the water. It gently receives him, and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him, as wave follows wave, while he, now wholly serene and sure, with regal composure, allows himself to glide.

All the things that cannot be gained through our pleading can be given to us only as something unexpected, something extra: this is why I am yet again confirmed in my belief that often nothing seems to matter in life but the longest patience.

Porque lo bello no es sino el comienzo de lo terrible