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Quotes About Understanding

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
I am so afraid of people's words.They describe so distinctly everything: And this they call dog and that they call house, here the start and there the end. I worry about their mockery with words, they know everything, what will be, what was; no mountain is still miraculous; and their house and yard lead right up to God. I want to warn and object: Let the things be! I enjoy listening to the sound they are making. But you always touch: and they hush and stand still. That's how you kill.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out: "I am an evening cloud too." They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me. Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings. That is how evening clouds greet each other. They had recognized me.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again;
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
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.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Don't ask for any advice from them and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very large; rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with Your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Who shows a child, just as they are? Who sets it in its constellation, and gives the measure of distance into its hand? Who makes a child's death out of grey bread, that hardens, - or leaves it inside its round mouth like the core of a shining apple? Killers are easy to grasp. But this: death, the whole of death, before life, to hold it so softly, and not live in anger, cannot be expressed.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
In the depths everything becomes law.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Num casal há sempre um que que é o guardião da solidão do outro.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
The longer i live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Tout ce qui nous émeut, tu le partages. Mais ce qui t'arrive, nous l'ignorons. Il faudrait être cent papillons pour lire toutes tes pages. Il y en a d'entre vous qui sont comme des dictionnaires; ceux qui les cueillent ont envie de faire relier toutes ces feuilles. Moi, j'aime les roses épistolaires.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Things are not as easy to understand or express as we are mostly led to believe; most of what happens cannot be put into words and takes place in a realm which no word has ever entered.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
I'm learning how to see. I don't know what the reason is, but everything enters into me more deeply and no longer stops at the point where it used to come to an end. I have an inner self that I knew nothing about. Now everything goes into it. I don't know what happens there.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and clam before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Things are not as easy to understand and say as we might prefer to believe; most events are inexpressible, happening in a space where no word has ever set foot, and most inexpressible of all are works of art, mysterious existences, whose life continues as ours passes away.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
El amor de un ser humano por otro, es posiblemente la prueba más difícil para cada uno de nosotros.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
All we can offer where we love is this: to loose each other; for to hold each other comes easy to us and requires no learning.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke