Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes - Page 18

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O trees of life, O when are you wintering?We are not unified. We have no instinctslike those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,and fall down to an indifferent lake.We realise flowering and fading together.And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Fall, Wind, Knowing

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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.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Dog, Humble, Thinking

Letter to his wife (October 23, 1907). "Letters on Cézanne". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke, 1952.

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There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Loneliness, Agreement, Solitude

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

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To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Writing, Ambition, Blood

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No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others

Rainer Maria Rilke

Fate, Hands, Events

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

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No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Art, Danger, Made

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There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.

Rainer Maria Rilke

May, Be Good, Pleasant

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You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Land, Seriousness

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How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?

Rainer Maria Rilke

Past, Soul, Enough

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Love Song”

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Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Two, Wells, Humans

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a kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Memories, Distance, Home

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But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, would feel the emotion that almost baffles us when a happy thing falls.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Spring, Rain, Fall

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FALLING STARS: Do you remember still the falling stars that like swift horses through the heavens raced and suddenly leaped across the hurdles of our wishes -- do you recall? And we did make so many! For there were countless numbers of stars: each time we looked above we were astounded by the swiftness of their daring play, while in our hearts we felt safe and secure watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate, knowing somehow we had survived their fall.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Horse, Stars, Fall

Rainer Maria Rilke, Albert Ernest Flemming (1986). “Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems”, p.210, Psychology Press

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I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Sleep, Fire, Punishment

Rainer Maria Rilke, Anita Barrows, Joanna Macy (1996). “Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God”, Riverhead Trade (Paperbacks)

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There are quite a number of people in the reading-room; but one is not aware of them. They are inside the books. They move, sometimes, within the pages like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Dream, Reading, Moving

Rainer Maria Rilke (1930). “The Journal of My Other Self”

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It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)

Rainer Maria Rilke

Wine, Wanted, Knows

Rainer Maria Rilke (1993). “Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke”, p.117, W. W. Norton & Company

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And when suddenly the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry, uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ – she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?

Rainer Maria Rilke

Cry, Said, Anguish

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Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Pain, Color, Intellectual

Letter to his wife (October 21, 1907). "Letters on Cézanne". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke, 1952.

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And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?

Rainer Maria Rilke

Wall, Memories, House

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I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Criticism, Doe, Letters

Rainer Maria Rilke (1969). “Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910”, p.293, W. W. Norton & Company

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Do you remember how life yearned out of childhood toward the "great thing?" I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Childhood, Remember, Longing

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To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Joy, Dumb, Add

Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: XIII”

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I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Heart, Sky, Steps

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Lament”

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Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Art, Loneliness, Criticism

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Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Death, Dying, Storm

Rainer Maria Rilke (2005). “In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus”, Riverhead Books (Hardcover)

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Born: December 4, 1875
Died: December 29, 1926
Occupation: Poet
Cite this Page: Citation

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