Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes - Page 3

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?

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For beauty's nothing but the beginning of terror we're still just able to bear.

ما أجمل أن تكون بصحبة أناس يقرأون

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

And those, who come together in the night and are twined in quivering pleasure, are performing a serious work and are heaping up sweetness, depth and force for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to express inexpressible ecstasies

If only mankind could hold its own fertility in awe, which is one and the same whether it manifests itself in the spirit or in the flesh. For creativity in the spirit has its origins in the physical kind, is of one nature with it and only a more delicate, more rapt and less fleeting version of the carnal sort of sex.

Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer

Our heart always transcends us.

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

Art is childhood.

No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be "happy" - once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy!

Above all marriage is a new task and a new seriousness - a new challenge and a question regarding the strength and kindness of each participant and a new great danger for both.

At first the solitude
charmed me like a prelude,
but so much music wounded me.

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.

Oh hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more than the past appeared
and what streamed out before us was not the future.
We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sake
of those with nothing left but their grownupness.

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.