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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Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.

Rainer Maria Rilke

August, World, Rodin

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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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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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Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Heart, Breathing, Silence

Rainer Maria Rilke, “To Music”

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Be ahead of all farewells as if they were behind you, like the winter that is just departing.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Farewell, Winter, Behind You

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That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Heart, People, Beginners

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If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So like children, we begin again... to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. (from the poem "How Sure Gravity's Law")

Rainer Maria Rilke

Lonely, Children, Confused

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As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Trying, And Love, Feels

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Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Air, Cities, Names

"Worpswede". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903.

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Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Food, Cutting, Sea

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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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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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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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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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Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Art, Loneliness, Infinite

'Briefe an einem jungen Dichter' (Letters to a Young Poet, 1929) 23 April 1903 (translation by Reginald Snell)

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So it's back once more, back up the slope. Why do they always ruin my rope with their cuts? I felt so ready the other day, Had a real foretaste of eternity In my guts. Spoonfeeding me yet another sip from life's cup. I don't want it, won't take any more of it. Let me throw up. Life is medium rare and good, I see, And the world full of soup and bread, But it won't pass into the blood for me, Just goes to my head. It makes me ill, though others it feeds; Do see that I must deny it! For a thousand years from now at least I'm keeping a diet.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Real, Cutting, Blood

Rainer Maria Rilke, Walter W. Arndt (1989). “The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-true Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary, and Compact Biography ; Translated by Walter Arndt ; Foreword by Cyrus Hamlin”, p.25, UPNE

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Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Artist, Creative, Grace

Rainer Maria Rilke (2002). “Letters on Cézanne”, p.60, Macmillan

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Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Song, Joy, Forever

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

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What do the contours of your body mean, laid out like the lines on a hand, so that I no longer see them except as fate?

Rainer Maria Rilke

Mean, Fate, Hands

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with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Writing, Long, Lines

Rainer Maria Rilke, Burton Pike (2008). “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”, p.13, Dalkey Archive Press

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

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