Quotes About Life

And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.

si disponemos nuestra vida según el principio que nos aconseja mantenernos siempre en lo difícil, lo que nos parecía extraño, se nos transformará en algo infinitamente fiel y digno de toda confianza. [...] Quizá todos los dragones de nuestra vida sean princesas que sólo esperan vernos una vez hermosos y valientes. Quizá todo lo horrible, en el fondo, sea sólo una forma de desamparo que solicita nuestra ayuda.

You said live out loud, and die you said lightly, and over and over again you said be.

The myths about the dragons who at the last moment turn into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses, only waiting for the day when they will see us handsome and brave?

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. Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke

Es handelt sich darum, alles zu leben. Wenn man die Fragen lebt, lebt man vielleicht allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fremden Tages in die Antworten hinein.

The weight of this unexplained and perhaps greatest event, which only due to a misunder- standing has gained the reputation of being arbitrary and cruel, presses us (I think increasingly) more evenly and more deeply into life and places the utmost obligations on our slowly growing strengths

The main thing was being alive. That was the main thing.

My silence was the quiet of a stone. But in these weeks of the awakening Spring Something within me has been freed- something That in the past dark years unconscious lay, Which rises now within me and commands And gives my poor warm life into your hands Who know not what I was that Yesterday. - The Woman Who Loves

Others must by a long dark way Stray to the mystic bards, Or ask some one who has heard them sing Or touch the magic chords. Only the maidens question not The bridges that lead to Dream; Their luminous smiles are like strands of pearls On a silver vase agleam. The maidens' doors of Life lead out Where the song of the poet soars, And out beyond to the great world- To the world beyond the doors. - Maidens

To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating.

Always trust yourself. If it turns out you are wrong, then that natural course of your inner life will lead you to other insights.

Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you?

if a sadness arises before you, greater than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and the shadows of clouds, passes over your hands and over all you do, you must suppose that something is acting upon you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand. It will not let you fall.

do not believe that he who is seeking to comfort you lives effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much trouble and sadness and remains far behind you. But were it otherwise, he could never have found those words.

find enough patience in yourself to endure, and enough simplicity to believe; that you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult, and in particular your solitude. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, every time.

I want to encourage you in your pain so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life, like everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength.

How dear will you be to me then, you nights of affliction. Why couldn't I kneel more deeply and accept you, inconsolable sisters, or lose myself more freely in your loosened hair. We spendthrifts of sorrows. How we scan beyond them ahead into sad duration to see if perhaps they might have an end. But they are truly our winter-hardy foliage, the dark green of our life's meaning, one season of our secret year—, not only time—, but also place, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work.

So badly does one live, because one always comes incomplete into the present, inept and scatter-brained.

Please don't think that the person trying to comfort you is living untroubled among these simple, quiet words that sometimes do you good. His own life has plenty of trouble and sadness; it lags far behind his words. And yet, were that not true, he would never have been able to find them.

of all the disfigured and decaying Things, which, after all, are essentially nothing more than accidental remains from another time and from a life that is not and should not be ours.

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen, die sich über die Dinge ziehn. Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen, aber versuchen will ich ihn. Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm, und ich kreise jahrtausendelang; und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm oder ein großer Gesang.

Women, in whom life abides and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more trustingly, are bound to have ripened more thoroughly, become more human human beings, than a man, who is all too light and has not been pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of a bodily fruit and who, in his arrogance and impatience, undervalues what he thinks he loves.