Quotes About Reflection

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)

I believe that love remains so strong and powerful in your memory because it was your first deep experience of solitariness and the first inner work that you undertook on your life.

Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still survives, a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before-- just as it is, it passes into the invisible world. Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater.

Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night's quietest hour: must I write?

Tudo quanto é velocidade não será mais do que passado, porque só aquilo que demora nos inicia.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves...

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

Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.

Stiller Freund der vielen Fernen, fühle, wie dein Atem noch den Raum vermehrt.

Weltinnenraum," "world-inner-space". It is most often used to speak that essential space within the heart of a human being.

I am able more and more to make use of that long patience you have taught me by your tenacious example; that patience which, disproportionate to ordinary life which seems to bid us haste, puts us in touch with all that surpasses us.

Ich glaube, daß fast alle unsere Traurigkeiten Momente der Spannung sind, die wir als Lähmung empfinden, weil wir unsere befremdeten Gefühle nicht mehr leben hören. Weil wir mit dem Fremden, das bei uns eingetreten ist, allein sind, weil uns alles Vertraute und Gewohnte für einen Augenblick fortgenommen ist; weil wir mitten in einem Übergang stehen, wo wir nicht stehen bleiben können.

Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; {...} only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love.

I don't like to write letters while I am traveling, because for letter writing I need more than the most necessary tools: some silence and solitude and a not too familiar hour.

Est-ce en exemple que tu te proposes? Peut-on se remplir comme les roses, en multipliant sa subtile matière qu'on avait faite pour ne rien faire? Car ce n'est pas travailler que d'être une rose, dirait-on. Dieu, en regardant par la fenêtre, fait la maison.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them.

ich kreise jahrtausendelang; und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm

Solitude is not merely a matter of being alone: it is a territory to be entered and occupied.

turn towards nature, and try, like a First Man, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not lose too much time and too much courage in explaining

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)

Ich glaube, dass fast alle unsere Traurigkeiten Momente der Spannung sind, die wir als Lähmung empfinden, weil wir unsere befremdeten Gefühle nicht mehr leben hören. Weil wir mit dem Fremden, das bei uns eingetreten ist, allein sind; weil uns alles Vertraute und Gewohnte für einen Augenblick fortgenommen ist; weil wir mitten in einem Übergang stehen, wo wir nicht stehen bleiben können.