Quotes About Rilke

In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization.

It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids.

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

Often when I imagine you, your wholeness cascades into many shapes. You run like a herd of luminous deer, and I am dark; I am forest.

Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.

Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

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

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.

Always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others.

The inner, what is it: if not intensified sky hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.

All who seek you test you. And those who find you bind you to image and gesture. I would rather sense you as the earth senses you. In my ripening ripens what you are.

Take the emptiness you hold in your arms And scatter it into the open spaces we breathe. Maybe the birds will feel how the air is thinner, And fly with more affection.

Rainer Maria Rilke

If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge extends and out a little over the outworks of our surmising, perhaps we should then bear our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new, something unknown, has entered us.

Nowhere, beloved, can world be but within us. Our life passes in transformation. And the external dwindles away.

It is still this death which continues inside of me, which works in me, which transforms my heart, which deepens the red of my blood, which bears down heavily on the life that had been ours so that this death becomes a bittersweet drop coursing through my veins and permeating everything, and which ought to be mine forever.

Among people, particularly those I love, I so easily get talking and give out everything possible in conversation, so that it is not available for my work. It is a stupid piece of clumsiness that I am so wanting in the gift of sociability, the talent for easy but at the same time recreative conversations, in which one does not exert and expend onesel

Yes — the springtime needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. (Ja, die Frühlinge brauchten dich wohl. Es muteten manche Stirme dir zu, dass du sie spürtest.)

Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now.

If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge extends and out a little over the outworks of our surmising, perhaps we should then bear our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys.