Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes - Page 2

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Every angel is terrifying.

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

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.

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.

Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours
grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves
from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived:
the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string
to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.

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.

Someday you will name me,
then gently place those burning
holy roses in my hair.

[Songs of Longing]

Art too is just a way of living.

O Stunden in der Kindheit,
da hinter den Figuren mehr als nur
Vergangnes war und vor uns nicht die Zukunft.

we want it visible
to show
when even the most
visible joy
will reveal itself
only when we have
transformed it within.

there’s nowhere, my love, the
world can exist
expect within.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.

I want to unfold.
I don’t want to be folded anywhere,
because where I am folded,
there I am a lie.

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.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

Bibliothèque Nationale. Ich sitze und lese einen Dichter. Es sind viele Leute im Saal, aber man spürt sie nicht. Sie sind in den Büchern. Manchmal bewegen sie sich in den Blättern, wie Menschen, die schlafen und sich umwenden zwischen zwei Träumen.