Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

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René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke , was a Austrian poet and novelist. He is “widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets”. He wrote both verse and highly lyrical prose. Here are some quotes;

Table of Contents

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
The only journey is the one within.
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Everything terrible is something that needs our love.
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
“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.”
“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.”
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but 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.”
“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.
A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”
“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
“To love is good, too: love being difficult. 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.”
“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.”
“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
“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.”
“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”
“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”
“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.”
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
…live in the question.”
“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes Love

…for this is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess of that precious nourishing love from which flowers and children have their strength and which could help all human beings if they would take it without doubting.
We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it.
It is a question in marriage, to my feeling, not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow. A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.
…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.
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment.

…I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.
It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.
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.
When my soul touches yours a great chord sings!
How shall I tune it then to other things?
Extinguish my sight, and I can still see you;
plug up my ears, and I can still hear;
even without feet I can walk toward you,
and without mouth I can still implore.
Break off my arms, and I will hold you
with my heart as if it were a hand;
strangle my heart, and my brain will still throb;
and should you set fire to my brain,
I still can carry you with my blood.
Just give me a little more time!
I want to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they’re worthy of you and real.
Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest essence, something that needs our love.
Do continue to believe that with your feeling and with your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate in yourself this belief, the more will reality and world go forth from it.
…I’ve never actually wondered how many faces there are. There are a great many people, but there are even more faces because each person has several.
In life there are no classes for beginners; you’re always required to do the most difficult things straightaway

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes Solitude

“Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself in another’s sake.”
“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.”
“Before a human being thinks of others he must have been unapologetically himself; he must have taken the measure of his nature in order to master it and employ it for the benefit of others like himself.”
“Look, we don’t love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms.”
“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.”
“All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to eachother, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling.”
“The most fleeting of relation between people is governed by the state of mind they bring to it -now at once a vastness will enter into it if that vastness is there to begin with.”
“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during their honest struggles with each other, that is, in the edges of their passion that became ragged and sharp when cooled and set, if they could stay fluid, active, flexible, and changeable in all of their interactions and relations, and, in word, if a mutually human and friendly consideration remained available to them, then their decision to separate cannot easily conjure disaster and terror.”

“There is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another. That is work, day labor, day labor, God knows there is no other word for it.”
“Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.”
Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasuure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work.”
“So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!”
“To speak of love is to speak of hardness.”
“May I be granted that, in your hands, the habit of looking on love as a thing to accomplish will leave, like an old pain- and that, slowly raising my eyes to look at you, I would no longer know where it had hurt- or where it had been.”
To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.”
“The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them.”
“…human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most changeable of all, rising and falling, from minute to minute, and lovers are those whose relationships and contact no one moment resembles another.”
“I am of the opinion that ‘marriage’ as such does not deserve as much emphasis as it has acquired through the conventional development of its nature. It does not occur to anyone to expect a single person to be ‘happy’ -but if he marries, people are much suprised if he isn’t.”
“Marriage is, in many respects, a simplification of one’s way of life, and the union naturally combines the forces and wills of two young people so that, together, they seem to reach farther into the future than before. -Only, those are sensations by which one cannot live.”

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes Be Patient

“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.”
“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.
All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.
Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!