Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes - Page 14

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• 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.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Being Alone, Solitude, Reason

  "Letters to a Young Poet". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke. Letter Seven (May 14, 1904), 1929.

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• All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Thinking, Blood, Childhood

  "Letters to a Young Poet". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke. Letter Nine (November 04, 1904), 1929.

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• So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Cities, People, Dies

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• My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths, and at that, the one that will be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because Death’s note wants to climb over— but in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on, beautiful.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Beautiful, Song, Dark

  Rainer Maria Rilke (1981). “Selected Poems”

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• Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Earth, Irrevocable, Has Beens

  Rainer Maria Rilke (1961). “Duino Elegies, Bilingual Edition”, p.67, Univ of California Press

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• Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know every bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  House, Leaving, Lasts

  Rainer Maria Rilke (1941). “Fifty Selected Poems with English Translations”

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• To be an artist means not to compute or count.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Mean, Artist

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2010). “Letters to a Young Poet”, p.26, New World Library

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• Look: the trees exist; the houses we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we pass by it all, like a rush of air. And everything conspires to keep quiet about us, half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Air, House, Tree

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• Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'hierarchies? and even if one of thempressed me against his heart: I would be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothingbut the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,and we are so awed because it serenely disdainsto annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Heart, Angel, Would Be

  Duino Elegies no. 1 (written 1912) (translation by Stephen Mitchell)

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• You must change your life.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Changing Your Life

  Rainer Maria Rilke (1940). “Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems”, p.140, Univ of California Press

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• More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Marriage, Legs, Four

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• If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself, Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Everyday, Matter, Complaining

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2010). “Letters to a Young Poet”, p.12, New World Library

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• If we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. 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.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Courage, Princess, Race

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• Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes. ... We must, strictly speaking, at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Change, Giving, Entering

  Rainer Maria Rilke (1945). “Letters”

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• I have patience for centuries in me and will live as though my time were very big.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Century, Bigs, Having Patience

  Rainer Maria Rilke (1969). “Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910”, p.121, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It is possible I am pushing through solid rock, like the vein of ore encased, alone. I am such a long way in I can see no way through and no space. Everything is close to my face and everything close to my face is stone. I don't have much knowledge yet in grief, so this darkness makes me feel small. You, be the Master; Make yourself fierce; break in. And then your great transforming will happen to me And my great grief cry will happen to you.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Grief, Struggle, Rocks

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• Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Eye, Sky, Silence

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2014). “The Book of Images”, p.5, North Point Press

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• The hero is strangely akin to those who die young.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Hero, Young, Die Young

  Rainer Maria Rilke (1975). “University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures”

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• I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  World, Enough, This World

  Rainer Maria Rilke, Annemarie S. Kidder (2001). “The Book of Hours: Prayers to a Lowly God”, p.39, Northwestern University Press

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• I implore those who love me to love my solitude.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Solitude

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• The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable it is alternately stone in you and star.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Stars, Fall, Sunset

  Rainer Maria Rilke, “Evening”

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• What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Fighting, Winning, Want

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• There would have to be bread, some rich, whole-grain bread and zwieback, and perhaps on a long, narrow dish some pale Westphalian ham laced with strips of white fat like an evening sky with bands of clouds. There would be some tea ready to be drunk, yellowish golden tea in glasses with silver saucers, giving off a faint fragrance.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Clouds, Glasses, Sky

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• Sex is difficult, yes. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged...If you only recognize this and manage out of yourself, out of your own nature and ways, out of your own experience and childhood and strength to achieve a relation to sex wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom) then you need no longer be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Sex, Childhood, Needs

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• The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping is nothing without the continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousandfold assent from Things and animals... beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Beautiful, Memories, Animal

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

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