Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes
Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.
As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.
To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.
May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith.
A billion stars go spinning through the night, / glittering above your head, / But in you is the presence that will be / when all the stars are dead.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom.
Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.
Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.
A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.
Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.
He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.
Solitude is nothing that one can choose or retrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.
Be ahead of all farewells as if they were behind you, like the winter that is just departing.
I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me.
I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.
You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait.
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
The flower bends when the wind wants it to, and you must become like that-that is, filled with deep # trust .
I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.
Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.
Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant path, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.
Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.
Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.
What keeps you from... living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?
Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.
She followed slowly, taking a long time, As though there were some obstacles in the way; And yet: as though, once it was overcome, She would be beyond all walking, and would fly.
I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.
Be patient with all that is unsolved in your life. Learn to love the questions themselves, until some distant day, without your knowing, you will have lived into the answers.
God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.
The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.
May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.
They, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.
