Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

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

‎"Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems."

Rainer Maria Rilke

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

 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

 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

 

"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."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

 

"We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

 

“Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.”
Rainer Maria Rilke quotes (Austro-German lyric poet, author of Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, 1875-1926)

 

It’s as if I’m pushing through massive mountains
through hard veins, like solitary ore;
and I’m so deep that I can see no end
and no distance: everything becomes nearness
and all the nearness turned to stone.
I’m still a novice in the realm of pain,--
so this enormous darkness makes me small;
But if it’s You --- steel yourself, break in:
that your whole hand will grip me
and my whole scream will seize you.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Already the red barberries are ripening,
old asters are breathing weakly in their beds.
Whoever lacks riches now, with summer’s passing,
will always wait and even lack himself.
Who ever cannot close his eyes now,
confident that inside him endless visions
are only waiting for the night to start
so that they can rise up in his darkness:--
his life is over, he’s like an old man.
Nothing else will come, no more days will flare,
and what does happen will leave him feeling cheated;
even you, my God. And you’re like a stone
that each day pulls him down.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

God talks to each of us as he creates us,
then walks with us silently out of night.
But the words, spoken to us before we start,
those cloudy words, are these:
Sent forth by your senses,
go to the very edge of your desire;
invest me.
Back behind the things grow as fire,
so that their shadows, lengthened,
will always and completely cover me.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Only press on: no feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself be cut off from me.
Nearby is that country
known as Life.
You will recognize it
by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
 
A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.

— Rainer Maria Rilke