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Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes - Page 18

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Spring has again returned. The Earth is like a child that knows many poems. Many, O so many. For the hardship of such long learning she receives the prize. Strict was her teacher. The white in the old man's beard

Spring has again returned. The Earth is like a child that knows many poems. Many, O so many. For the hardship of such long learning she receives the prize. Strict was her teacher. The white in the old man's beard pleases us. Now, what to call green, to call blue, we dare to ask: She knows, She knows!

Rainer Maria Rilke
Teacher, Children, Spring

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

I would like to step out of my heart and go walking beneath the enormous sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Heart, Sky, Steps
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Lament”

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

Rainer Maria Rilke
Walks, Supper, Walking
Rainer Maria Rilke (1981). “Selected Poems”

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”

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

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.

It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Thinking, Doe, Alive
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Fear Of The Inexplicable”

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

There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Birthday, Men, Littles

The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping is nothing without the continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousandfold assent from Things and animals... beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Beautiful, Memories, Animal
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

a kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Memories, Distance, Home

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Loneliness, Criticism

But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, would feel the emotion that almost baffles us when a happy thing falls.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Spring, Rain, Fall

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Joy, Dumb, Add
Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: XIII”

There would have to be bread, some rich, whole-grain bread and zwieback, and perhaps on a long, narrow dish some pale Westphalian ham laced with strips of white fat like an evening sky with bands of clouds. There would be some tea ready to be drunk, yellowish golden tea in glasses with silver saucers, giving off a faint fragrance.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Clouds, Glasses, Sky

Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Death, Dying, Storm
Rainer Maria Rilke (2005). “In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus”, Riverhead Books (Hardcover)

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

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”

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Danger, Made

And yet, for some time now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?

Rainer Maria Rilke
Fear, Force, Stills
"Prose and Poetry".

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Sleep, Rose, Joy
Rainer Maria Rilke (2015). “Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke”, p.260, Modern Library

Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write [create]? Dig into yourself for a deep answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Writing, Night, Answers

So it's back once more, back up the slope. Why do they always ruin my rope with their cuts? I felt so ready the other day, Had a real foretaste of eternity In my guts. Spoonfeeding me yet another sip from life's cup. I don't want it, won't take any more of it. Let me throw up. Life is medium rare and good, I see, And the world full of soup and bread, But it won't pass into the blood for me, Just goes to my head. It makes me ill, though others it feeds; Do see that I must deny it! For a thousand years from now at least I'm keeping a diet.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Real, Cutting, Blood
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”, p.25, UPNE

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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