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Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes about Art

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Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works

Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Believe, Space
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Gone, Way
Rainer Maria Rilke (2002). “Letters on Cézanne”, p.4, Macmillan

Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Spring, Unique

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

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

Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Clever, Mean
"Letters to a Young Poet". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke. Letter Three (April 23, 1903), 1929.

More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Mysterious, Existence
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Judging, Creative
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Criticism, Littles
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, Criticism, Littles
"Letters to a Young Poet". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke. Letter One (February 17, 1903), 1929.

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

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

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)

My art is representational by choice....if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Art, People, Choices

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