Rainer Maria Rilke
84 quotes
Biography
"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."
"No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger."
"Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always."
"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
"Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky."
"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."
"We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it."
"Let everything happen to youBeauty and terrorJust keep goingNo feeling is final"
"I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world."
"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."
"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."
"Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other."
"Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.And without feet I can make my way to you,without a mouth I can swear your name.Break off my arms, I'll take hold of youwith my heart as with a hand.Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.And if you consume my brain with fire,I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood."
"For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."
"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 beauty is nothing but the beginning of terrorwhich we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,because it serenely disdains to destroy us.Every angel is terrible."
"Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
"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; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place."
"That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other."
"If we surrenderedto earth's intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees."
"The only journey is the one within."
"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."
"You darkness, that I come from,I love you more than all the firesthat fence in the world,for the fire makesa circle of light for everyone,and then no one outside learns of you.But the darkness pulls in everything:shapes and fires, animals and myself,how easily it gathers them! -powers and people -and it is possible a great energyis moving near me.I have faith in nights."