Rainer Maria Rilke famous quotes

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

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#New Year #Nature #New Beginnings

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Heart #Inner Peace #Relaxation

The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Love #Solitude #Introvert

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and 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

#Love #Strength #Faith

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

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Life #Believe #Let Me

But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Home #Support #Solitude

You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Love You #Fire #Darkness

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Fall #Bird #Teach

The only journey is the one within.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Life #Beautiful #Journey

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 #Depression #Princess

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Reading #Book #People

Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Creating #Profound #Remembrance

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

#Intelligent #Knowing #Giving

Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over...Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Believe #Winning #Earth

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Eye #Heart #Done

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

#Sadness #Simple #Simplicity

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 #Hands

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Love #Marriage #Loving Life

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart...
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Love #Heart #Patient

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Patience #Solitude #Ego

Shattered people are best represented by bits and pieces.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#People #Pieces #Shattered

Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Wise #Giving Up #Children

Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Names #Hair #Rose

Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Beautiful #Uplifting #Dream

a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Inspirational #Anniversary #Marriage

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Friendship #Relationship #Marriage

Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Morning #Flower #Men

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Loneliness #Solitude #Secret

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

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Change #Past #Looks

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Beautiful #Princess #Adversity

Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Inspirational #Compassion #Enjoy Life

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Life #Purpose #Defeated

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Heart #Writing #Roots

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

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

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Nature #Tree #Earth

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Inspiring #Nature #Simplicity

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Nature #Spring #Heart

Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Hours

We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Important #Intimate

No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Reality #Missing #World

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Love #Life #Carpe Diem

I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false...
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Self #Want

When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everthing in me that is bewildered and confused.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Confused #Ocean #Sea

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Falling In Love #Heart #Falling Apart

I am so glad you are here. It helps me realize how beautiful my world is.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Love #Beautiful #Appreciation

We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Courage #Pages #Brightness

Think... of the world you carry within you.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Healing #Thinking #World

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Future #Order #Long

Be patient with all that is unsolved in your life. Learn to love the questions themselves, until some distant day, without your knowing, you will have lived into the answers.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Knowing #Answers #Be Patient

The flower bends when the wind wants it to, and you must become like that-that is, filled with deep #‎ trust .
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Flower #Wind #Want

Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Emotional #Flow

Wishes are recollections coming from the future.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Wish #Idealism #Recollection

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Children #Spring #Earth

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Encouraging #Encouragement #Not Giving Up

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

#Love #Measles #Love You

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Riches #Poverty #Blame

Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Yesterday #Bird #Evening

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Angel #Able #Endure

But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Life #Circles #Community

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

#Dream #Reality #Contemplation

Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Perfect #Giving #Joy

Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#God #Dark #Roots

Every angel is terrifying.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Angel #Elegy

What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Solitude #Ends #Needed

It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Struggle #Identity #Cost

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise...
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Sadness #Order #Noise

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.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Sadness #Emotion #Moments

Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Fear #Hippie #Dragons

All things want to float.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Want

Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Names #Fame #Misunderstanding

Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation.​ You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold​, comes at long last over everyone.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Talking #Long #Lasts

In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Summer #Pain #Spring

Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Feelings #Growth #Development

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Terror #Bearable

Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Needs #Helping #Helpless

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Sadness #Order #Disease

You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything the darkness that comes with every infinite fall and the shivering blaze of every step up. So many live on and want nothing And are raised to the rank of prince By the slippery ease of their light judgments But what you love to see are faces that do work and feel thirst. You love most of all those who need you as they need a crowbar or a hoe. You have not grown old, and it is not too late To dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Fall #Light #Hoe

only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Relationship #Alive #Sound

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Nature #Children #Integrity

To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Mean #Childhood #Thousand

I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Thinking #Wish #Way

Be of good courage all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost...What is required of us is that we live the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Hands #Friendly #Force

Our heart always transcends us.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Heart

Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you. And without feet I can make my way to you, without a mouth I can swear your name. Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you with my heart as with a hand. Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat. And if you consume my brain with fire, I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Heart #Eye #Blood

Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Important

Art too is just a way of living.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Art #Way

And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Memories #Blood #Waiting

Everything terrible is something that needs our love.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Needs #Our Love #Terrible

Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Unbearable #Transformation #Difficult

Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Tasks #Earth

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Moving #Future #Space

If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Faithful #Principles #Aliens

Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Patience #Answers #Way

I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Spiritual #Giving #Advice

it is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

#Solitude #Trying #Cost