Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes - Page 19

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Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Mountain, Moses

Rainer Maria Rilke (2002). “Letters on Cézanne”, p.10, Macmillan

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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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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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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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My art is representational by choice....if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Art, People, Choices

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Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Answers, Way, Someday

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Describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty-describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Dream, Memories, Humble

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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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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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Stand up during supper and walk outdoors, and keep on walking.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Walks, Supper, Walking

Rainer Maria Rilke (1981). “Selected Poems”

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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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She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Different, Celebration, Thread

Rainer Maria Rilke (1996). “Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God”, Riverhead Books (Hardcover)

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Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner -- what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Stars, Cutting, Wind

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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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Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Confused, Responsibility, Men

Rainer Maria Rilke (2010). “Letters to a Young Poet”, p.39, New World Library

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Life and death: they are one, at core entwined. Who understands himself from his own strain presses himself into a drop of wine and throws himself into the purest flame.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Spiritual, Wine, Flames

Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.83, W. W. Norton & Company

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We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard - of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Life, Way, Strange

John J. L. Mood, Rainer Maria Rilke (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.118, W. W. Norton & Company

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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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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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Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Stones, Becoming, Fame

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

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Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Sadness, Order, People

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Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Beautiful, Taken, Creativity

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

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Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Art, Real, Practice

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

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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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True singing is a different breath, about nothing.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Singing, Different, Breaths

Rainer Maria Rilke (2014). “The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition”, p.87, Vintage

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

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