Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away.

Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind.

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries.

A good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?

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.

But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.

Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

To love is good, too: love being difficult.

Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.

For to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers.

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise.

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.

“I recognize the desire to surprise your own life. ‘You must change your life,’ as the poet Rilke said.”

“Put out my eyes, and I can see you still; slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet; and without any feet can go to you; and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.”

“You, God, who live next door-- If at times, through the long night, I trouble you with my urgent knocking-- this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.”

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.”

“God, who can hold you? To yourself alone belonging, by no owner’s hand disturbed, you are like unripened wine that unperturbed grows ever sweeter and is all alone.”

“You love most of all those who need you as they need a crowbar or a hoe. You have not grown old, and it is not too late To dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret.”

“I read it in your word, and learn it from the history of the gestures of your warm wise hands, rounding themselves to form and circumscribe the shapes that are to come.”

“I am the rest between two notes which, struck together, sound discordantly, because death’s note would claim a higher key. But in the dark pause, trembling, the notes meet, harmonious. And the song continues sweet.”

“You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything the darkness that comes with every infinite fall and the shivering blaze of every step up.”

“So like children, we begin again... to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.”

“I know you’re all alone in that room. If you should be thirsty, there’s no one to get you a glass of water. I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign! I’m right here...”

“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.”

“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”

“I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.”

“You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.”

“So many live on and want nothing And are raised to the rank of prince By the slippery ease of their light judgments But what you love to see are faces that do work and feel thirst.”

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.”

“And if at night one holds you closely pressed, locked in his prayers so you cannot stray, …..you are the guest …..who comes, but not to stay.”

“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.”

“God, do not lose your equilibrium. Even he who loves you and discerns your face in darkness, when he trembles like a light you breathe upon, — he cannot own you quite.”

“I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.”