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Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes about Life

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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

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

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Love, Life, Beauty

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don't come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Inspirational, Life, Heart

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

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

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Inspirational, Life, Greatness

The only journey is the one within.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Beautiful, Journey

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Time, Giving Up

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Love, Inspirational, Life
Letter to Emanuel von Bodman, 17 Aug. 1901

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Inspirational, Life, Success
Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Mitchell (1983). “The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”, Random House (NY)

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Knowing, Answers

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Believe, Let Me
Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

you are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out it's own secret

Rainer Maria Rilke
Inspirational, Life, Hoe
Rainer Maria Rilke (1981). “Selected Poems”

And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Morning, Fire

You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. ... But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Sadness, Important

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Love, Life, Sexy

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

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

Live the questions now.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life
Rainer Maria Rilke (2012). “Letters to a Young Poet”, p.21, Courier Corporation

He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Determination, Doe
"Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke, 1960.

In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Adversity, Hands
Rainer Maria Rilke (1969). “Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910”, p.181, W. W. Norton & Company

At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Fate, Should Have
Rainer Maria Rilke (1969). “Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910”, p.149, W. W. Norton & Company

Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Destiny, Wish
"Letters to a Young Poet".

Be patient with all that is uncertain in your heart...do not search for answers, which will not be given: you will not be able to live them, and its importat to live everything.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Heart, Answers

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

Truly it is glorious, our being here.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Glorious

. . . denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben andern. (... for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.)

Rainer Maria Rilke
Life, Change, Doe

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