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Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes - Page 11

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There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Faces, Humans, Persons
Rainer Maria Rilke (1984). “Prose and poetry”, Burns & Oates

Life is cut to allow for growth ... one may vigorously put on weight before one fills it out entirely.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Cutting, Growth, Weight

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Writing, Use, Stranger

I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me.

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

Girls, there are poets who learn from you to say, what you, in your aloneness, are; and they learn through you to live distantness, as the evenings through the great stars become accustomed to eternity.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Girl, Stars, Evening
Rainer Maria Rilke (2014). “The Book of Images”, p.17, North Point Press

Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

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

No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Love, Girl, Mother
1923 Duinieser Elegien, no.3 (translated by Stephen Mitchell in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,1989).

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

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

Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Destiny, Wish
"Letters to a Young Poet".

Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside

Rainer Maria Rilke
Artist, Greatness, Destiny

I am like a child who awakes At the light, so safe and secureFree from night's fears when dawn breaks, In Thee I am ever secure.

Rainer Maria Rilke
God, Children, Night

What keeps you from... living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?

Rainer Maria Rilke
Pregnancy, Live Your Life, Lovely
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Childhood, Purpose, Growing
1910 DieAufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (translated by Stephen Mitchell inThe Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1989).

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Music, Piano, Different

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,as if orchards were dying high in space.Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."And tonight the heavy earth is fallingaway from all other stars in the loneliness.We're all falling. This hand here is falling.And look at the other one. It's in them all.And yet there is Someone, whose handsinfinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Stars, Loneliness, Fall
Rainer Maria Rilke (1981). “Selected Poems”

Whoever now makes himself bigger, freer and more human in his own existence, is doing his part toward peace, — as yet it must be worked at in an inward direction, not until a few have it all big and ready within them can it let itself be brought into the world.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Existence, Humans
"Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910".

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Night, Creative, Exaltation
Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.42, W. W. Norton & Company

We wasters of sorrows! How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our interior year.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Winter, Years, Sorrow
Rainer Maria Rilke (1984). “Prose and poetry”, Burns & Oates

Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and great each other.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Falling In Love, Two, Solitude

Be patient with all that is unsolved in your life. Learn to love the questions themselves, until some distant day, without your knowing, you will have lived into the answers.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Knowing, Answers, Patient

Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Stranger, Heard

Be patient with all that is uncertain in your heart...do not search for answers, which will not be given: you will not be able to live them, and its importat to live everything.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Heart, Answers

The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven... in the ponds broken off from the sky. . .

Rainer Maria Rilke
Sky, Rivers, Broken
Rainer Maria Rilke (2004). “Sonnets to Orpheus”, p.32, Shambhala Publications

If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things, they will not abandon you; and the nights are still here and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Moving, Animal, Night

In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!

Rainer Maria Rilke
Summer, Pain, Spring
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

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