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Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes - Page 16

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Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed.

Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Grief, Love Is, Remove
Rainer Maria Rilke (2014). “The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition”, p.119, Vintage

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Heart, Looks, Alive

Yield not thy neck To fortune's yoke, but let thy dauntless mind Still ride in triumph over all mischance. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Healing, Yield, Hands

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Fear, Action

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Children, Thinking, Sad And Happy
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

... be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.

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

Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Luxury, Lazy, Desire

If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Mean, Sick, Mind

Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Gone, Speak, Moments
Rainer Maria Rilke (2014). “The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition”, p.197, Vintage

One of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor and innocence.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Want, Tests, Innocence
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.

Rainer Maria Rilke
People, Beginners, Young
Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.37, W. W. Norton & Company

Now for some heartwork.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Heart
Rainer Maria Rilke (1969). “Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910”, p.3, W. W. Norton & Company

Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Strong, Mountain, Break Out
Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.43, W. W. Norton & Company

For bel.i.eve me, the more one is, the richer is all one experiences. And whoever wants to have deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Inspirational, Deep Love, Greatest Love

Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!

Rainer Maria Rilke
Ocean, Sky, Depth
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”, Dartmouth College

My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths, and at that, the one that will be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because Death’s note wants to climb over— but in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on, beautiful.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Beautiful, Song, Dark
Rainer Maria Rilke (1981). “Selected Poems”

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home. Speak and attest. More than ever the things we can live with are falling away, and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image. Will beneath crusts which readily crack whenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Fall, Home, Borders

Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Dove, Knows, Tenderness

For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Spring, Blood, Giving

To be in circumstances that are working upon us, that from time to time place us in front of great natural Things - that is all we need.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Needs, Natural, Circumstances
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Party, Two, People

Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Arrows, Sorrow, Abiding

As the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Arrows, Gathering, Momentum

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition.

Rainer Maria Rilke
People, Cost, Alive
"Letters to a Young Poet". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke. Letter Seven (May 14, 1904), 1929.

Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Book

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