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Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes - Page 12

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If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.

If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Faithful, Principles, Aliens
Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.119, W. W. Norton & Company

We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Reality, Accepting, Unprecedented
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Might, Lasts, Ends
Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1960.

I would like to sing someone to sleep, to sit beside someone and be there. I would like to rock you and sing softly and go with you to and from sleep. I would like to be the one in the house who knew: The night was cold. And I would like to listen in and listen out into you, into the world, into the woods. The clocks shout to one another striking, and one sees to the bottom of time. And down below one last, strange man walks by and rouses a strange dog. And after that comes silence. I have laid my eyes upon you wide; and they hold you gently and let you go when something stirs in the dark.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Dog, Sleep, Eye
"The Book of Images".

Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Love Is, Men, Hands
Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.35, W. W. Norton & Company

I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie, and I want my grasp of things to be true. I want to describe myself like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time, like a saying that I finally understood, like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother, like a ship that carried me through the wildest storm of all.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Mother, Lying, Long
Rainer Maria Rilke (1981). “Selected Poems”

Resolve to be always beginning-to be a beginner!

Rainer Maria Rilke
Beginners, Resolve
Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.... Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Beautiful, Princess, Dragons
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Fear Of The Inexplicable”

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves...At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Heart, Finding Yourself, Trying

What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Waiting, Advice, Feelings

Love the questions, themselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke (2013). “Letters to a Young Poet”, p.30, Penguin

Sometime we will have to stop overevaluating the word. We shall learn to realize that it is only one of the many bridges that connect the island of our soul with the great continent of common life. . . the broadest, perhaps, but in no way the most refined.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Islands, Bridges, Soul

Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Mean, Offering, Difficulty
Rainer Maria Rilke (1960). “Selected letters”

Do continue to believe that with your feeling and with your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate in yourself this belief, the more will reality and world go forth from it.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Confidence, Believe, Reality
"Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910".

I don’t want to stand before you like a thing, shrewd, secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action. And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to unfold. I don’t want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Lying, Moving, Secret

This above all-ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Strong, Nature, Writing

And you suddenly know: It was here! You pull yourself together, and there stands an irrevocable year of anguish and vision and prayer.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Prayer, Years, Vision
Rainer Maria Rilke (1940). “Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems”, p.41, Univ of California Press

Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Wise, Children, Giving Up
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Long, Fleeting, Gestures

Fig tree, how long it's been full meaning for me, the way you almost entirely omit to flower and into the seasonably-resolute fruit uncelebratedly thrust your purest secret. Like the tube of a fountain, your bent bough drives the sap downwards and up: and it leaps from its sleep, scarce waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Flower, Sleep, Long

Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Lying, Fate
Rainer Maria Rilke (1984). “Prose and poetry”, Burns & Oates

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Vision, Encounters, Done
"Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations".

Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Needs, Helping, Deep Down

a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude

Rainer Maria Rilke
Inspirational, Anniversary, Marriage
Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.34, W. W. Norton & Company

Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Morning, Flower, Animal
Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.112, W. W. Norton & Company

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