Rainer Maria Rilke Poet Quotes

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

That is the principal thing-not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

All who seek you
test you.
And those who find you
bind you to image and gesture.
I would rather sense you
as the earth senses you.
In my ripening
ripens what you are. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I don't like to
write letters while I am traveling, because for letter writing I need more than the
most necessary tools: some silence and solitude and a not too familiar hour. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Just keep going - no feeling is final. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

If somewhere deep within me arises some essence
of having been a child, one I never experienced,
perhaps the purest childness of my childhood,
I don't want to know it. Without even looking,
I want to form an angel out of it
and hurl him into the foremost rank
of screaming angels, to remind God. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

There comes a time when we have deposited in it all our firstlings, all beginning, all confidence, the seeds of all that which might perhaps some day come to be. And suddenly we realize: All that has sunk into a deep sea, and we don't even know just when. We never noticed it. As though some one were to collect all his money, and buy a feather with it and stick the feather in his hat: whish!
the first breeze will carry it away. Naturally he arrives home without his feather, and nothing remains for him but to look back and think when it would have flown. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

You, still the squanderers of the empty hall
when the twilight comes, wide as woods ...
And the chandelier, like a sixteen-pointer, vaults
where nothing can set foot. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Girls and women, in their new, particular unfolding, will only in passing imitate men's behavior and misbehavior and follow in male professions. Once the uncertainty of such transitions is over it will emerge that women have only passed through the spectrum and the variety of those (often laughable) disguises in order to purify their truest natures from the distorting influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life abides and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more trustingly, are bound to have ripened more thoroughly, become more human human beings, than a man, who is all too light and has not been pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of a bodily fruit and who, in his arrogance and impatience, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity which inhabits woman, brought to term in pain and humiliation, will, once she has shrugged off the conventions of mere femininity through the transformations of her outward status, come clearly to light, and men, who today do not yet feel it approaching, will be taken by surprise and struck down by it. One day (there are already reliable signs which speak for it and which begin to spread their light, especially in the northern countries), one day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any supplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being.

This ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

For your sake poets sequester themselves,
gather images to churn the mind,
journey forth, ripening with metaphor,
and all their lives they are so alone...

And painters paint their pictures only
that the world, so transient as you made it,
can be given back to you,
to last forever.

All becomes eternal. See: In the Mona Lisa
some woman has long since ripened like wine,
and the enduring feminine is held there
through all the ages.

Those who create are like you.
They long for the eternal.
They say, Stone, be forever!
And that means: be yours.

And lovers also gather your inheritance.
They are the poets of one brief hour.
They kiss an expressionless mouth into a smile
as if creating it anew, more beautiful.

Awakening desire, they make a place
where pain can enter;
that's how growing happens.
They bring suffering along with their laughter,
and longings that had slept and now awaken
to weep in a stranger's arms. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Our heart always transcends us. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The grief, too, passes. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Girls, there are poets who learn from you
to say, what you, in your aloneness, are;
and they learn through you to live distantness,
as the evenings through the great stars
become accustomed to eternity. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

*********
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which is in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

*********
Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the act of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and long experience of love, – just what is wholly
unsayable. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches? ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Oh quickly disappearing photograph
in my more slowly disappearing hand. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Where I create, there I am true. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me.. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. 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

Early this morning I read about your autumn, and all the colors you brought into your letter were changed back in my feelings and filled my mind to the brim with strength and radiance.
Yesterday, while I was admiring the dissolving brightness of autumn here, you were walking through that other autumn back home, which is painted on red wood, as this one's painted on silk. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

O stars, isn't it from you that the lover's desire for the face of his beloved arises? Doesn't his secret insight into her pure features come from the pure constellations? - from "The Third Elegy" by Rainer Maria Rilke Fine ~ Philip Pullman

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.
When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are
rarely the center
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous
curve. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write? ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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