Authors:

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes - Page 10

All Quotes Aliens Art Change Childhood Children Country Courage Creativity Criticism Darkness Desire Destiny Difficulty Doubt Dying Earth Eternity Faith Falling In Love Fame Fate Fear Feelings Future Giving God Greatness Grief Growth Healing Heart Home House Inspirational Inspiring Joy Letting Go Life Loneliness Love Lying Marriage Memories Morning Mountain Nature Pain Painting Past Patience Preparation Purpose Reading Reality Sadness Silence Simplicity Sleep Solitude Sorrow Soul Spring Struggle Success Summer Terror Vision Waiting Walking Water Wine Winning Winter Writing
In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.

In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Adversity, Hands
Rainer Maria Rilke (1969). “Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910”, p.181, W. W. Norton & Company

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Confused, Moving, Solitude
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

You, God, who live next door - If at times, through the long night, I trouble you with my urgent knocking - this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom. I know you're all alone in that room. If you should be thirsty, there's no one to get you a glass of water. I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign! I'm right here... Sen komşu tanrı, Uzun geceler bazen, Kapına vura vura uyandırıyorsam seni Solumanı seyrek duyduğumdandır... Bilirim, yalnızsın odanda. Sana birşey gerekse kimse yok, Bir yudum su versin aradığında. Hep dinlerim, yeter ki bir ses edin, Öyle yakınım sana.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Night, Glasses, Doors

Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves despite all opposition.

Rainer Maria Rilke
People, Way, Easy

Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing placed under profound laws, and when he goes out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then all status drops from him as from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of sheer life.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Morning, Men, Law

My eyes already touch the sunny hill. Going far ahead of the road I have begun. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has inner light, even from a distance- and charges us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are; a gesture waves us on answering our own wave... but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Distance, Eye, Light
Rainer Maria Rilke, “A Walk”

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Thinking, People, Emotion
Rainer Maria Rilke (2013). “The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke”, p.111, Vintage

It is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite necessity of that life and would have been absorbed by it without effort.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Names, Effort, Pieces

At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Fate, Should Have
Rainer Maria Rilke (1969). “Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910”, p.149, W. W. Norton & Company

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer

Rainer Maria Rilke
Summer, Spring, Mean

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Mean, Solitude
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Writing, Long, House
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Autumn Day”

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Dying, Accomplish, Unreal
Duino Elegies no. 4 (written 1912) (translation by Stephen Mitchell)

[A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Order, Important, Able

Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Inspirational, People, Alive
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

The flower bends when the wind wants it to, and you must become like that-that is, filled with deep #‎ trust .

Rainer Maria Rilke
Flower, Wind, Want

What we do battle with is so small, what battles us is so large.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Struggle, Battle

To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Mean, Childhood, Thousand
Rainer Maria Rilke (2007). “Letters on Life: New Prose Translations”, p.77, Modern Library

How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights! Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters, on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Grief, Dark, Night
Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salomé (2008). “Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters”, p.297, W. W. Norton & Company

Lord, it is time. The summer was very big. Lay thy shadow on the sundials, and on the meadows let the winds go loose. Command the last fruits that they shall be full; give them another two more southerly days, press them on to fulfillment and drive the last sweetiness into the heavenly wine.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Summer, Wine, Wind
Rainer Maria Rilke, M. D. Herter Norton (1993). “Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke”, p.71, W. W. Norton & Company

But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Long, Solitude, Life Is
Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.38, W. W. Norton & Company

Thus we live, forever taking leave.

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

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Irony, Moments, Cynicism
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor, then everything will become easier for you.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Humble, Winning, Trying
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Fate, Doe
Rainer Maria Rilke (2014). “The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition”, p.266, Vintage

You May Also Like: