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Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes - Page 19

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Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.

Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Two, Wells, Humans

Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Song, Joy, Forever
Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: XIII”

It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault, we both had nothing except patience, but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!) and I watched him as he took and took: none of it I could claim as mine.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Saws, Faults, Claims

That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Heart, People, Beginners

Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Food, Cutting, Sea

Do you remember how life yearned out of childhood toward the "great thing?" I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Childhood, Remember, Longing

There are quite a number of people in the reading-room; but one is not aware of them. They are inside the books. They move, sometimes, within the pages like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Dream, Reading, Moving
Rainer Maria Rilke (1930). “The Journal of My Other Self”

They all have tired mouths and bright seamless souls. And a longing (as for sin) sometimes haunts their dreams. They are almost all alike; in God's gardens they keep still, like many, many intervals in his might and melody. Only when they spread their wings are they wakers of a wind: as if God with his broad sculptor- hands leafed through the pages in the dark book of the beginning.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Dream, Book, Tired
Rainer Maria Rilke (2014). “The Book of Images”, p.31, North Point Press

Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Loneliness, Infinite
'Briefe an einem jungen Dichter' (Letters to a Young Poet, 1929) 23 April 1903 (translation by Reginald Snell)

It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)

Rainer Maria Rilke
Wine, Wanted, Knows
Rainer Maria Rilke (1993). “Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke”, p.117, W. W. Norton & Company

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Heart, Breathing, Silence
Rainer Maria Rilke, “To Music”

I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Sleep, Fire, Punishment
Rainer Maria Rilke, Anita Barrows, Joanna Macy (1996). “Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God”, Riverhead Trade (Paperbacks)

Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner -- what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Stars, Cutting, Wind

Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Pain, Color, Intellectual
Letter to his wife (October 21, 1907). "Letters on Cézanne". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke, 1952.

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Different, Celebration, Thread
Rainer Maria Rilke (1996). “Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God”, Riverhead Books (Hardcover)

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Air, Cities, Names
"Worpswede". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903.

As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Trying, And Love, Feels

Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.

Rainer Maria Rilke
August, World, Rodin

You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Land, Seriousness

If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So like children, we begin again... to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. (from the poem "How Sure Gravity's Law")

Rainer Maria Rilke
Lonely, Children, Confused

Sex is difficult, yes. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged...If you only recognize this and manage out of yourself, out of your own nature and ways, out of your own experience and childhood and strength to achieve a relation to sex wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom) then you need no longer be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Sex, Childhood, Needs

FALLING STARS: Do you remember still the falling stars that like swift horses through the heavens raced and suddenly leaped across the hurdles of our wishes -- do you recall? And we did make so many! For there were countless numbers of stars: each time we looked above we were astounded by the swiftness of their daring play, while in our hearts we felt safe and secure watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate, knowing somehow we had survived their fall.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Horse, Stars, Fall
Rainer Maria Rilke, Albert Ernest Flemming (1986). “Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems”, p.210, Psychology Press

We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard - of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Way, Strange
John J. L. Mood, Rainer Maria Rilke (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.118, W. W. Norton & Company

Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.).

Rainer Maria Rilke
Night, Expectations, Events
Rainer Maria Rilke (2014). “The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition”, p.5, Vintage

Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Confused, Responsibility, Men
Rainer Maria Rilke (2010). “Letters to a Young Poet”, p.39, New World Library

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