Rainer Maria Rilke
Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is finalCollection: Inspirational
and I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished songCollection: Song
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.Collection: Life
God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.Collection: Dog
I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.Collection: Self
Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.Collection: Real
Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.Collection: Endurance
Life - a sexually transmitted terminal condition.Collection: Perspective
What happens most deeply inside you is worthy of your whole love.Collection: Worthy
Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling... it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.Collection: Heart
It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.Collection: Believe
Think... of the world you carry within you.Collection: Healing
You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.Collection: I Love You More
He does not always remain bent over the pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Friendship
We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.Collection: Broken Heart
The moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.Collection: New Experiences
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.Collection: Song
I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything.Collection: Heart
Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.Collection: Angel
Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.Collection: Love And Death
Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them. They change the world.Collection: Moving
There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.Collection: Military
Just keep going - no feeling is final.Collection: Determination
If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.Collection: Morning
Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Home
Understand, I'll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I'll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows with only this one dream: You come too.Collection: Dream
Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?Collection: Impermanence
Life is heavier than the weight of all things.Collection: Weight
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!Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Faithful
the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense.Collection: Might
I would like to sing someone to sleep, to sit beside someone and be there. I would like to rock you and sing softly and go with you to and from sleep. I would like to be the one in the house who knew: The night was cold. And I would like to listen in and listen out into you, into the world, into the woods. The clocks shout to one another striking, and one sees to the bottom of time. And down below one last, strange man walks by and rouses a strange dog. And after that comes silence. I have laid my eyes upon you wide; and they hold you gently and let you go when something stirs in the dark.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Love Is
Resolve to be always beginning-to be a beginner!Collection: Beginners
We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.... Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.Collection: Beautiful
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves...At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer.Collection: Heart
What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.Collection: Waiting
Sometime we will have to stop overevaluating the word. We shall learn to realize that it is only one of the many bridges that connect the island of our soul with the great continent of common life. . . the broadest, perhaps, but in no way the most refined.Collection: Islands
Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.Collection: Mean
I don’t want to stand before you like a thing, shrewd, secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action. And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to unfold. I don’t want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.Collection: Lying
This above all-ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.Collection: Strong
And you suddenly know: It was here! You pull yourself together, and there stands an irrevocable year of anguish and vision and prayer.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Wise
Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act.Collection: Long
Fig tree, how long it's been full meaning for me, the way you almost entirely omit to flower and into the seasonably-resolute fruit uncelebratedly thrust your purest secret. Like the tube of a fountain, your bent bough drives the sap downwards and up: and it leaps from its sleep, scarce waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement.Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Confidence