Rainer Maria Rilke
That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.Collection: Vision
Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.Collection: Needs
a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitudeCollection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Morning
Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Dream
No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write, find out wether it spreading out its root in the deepest places of your heart...Delve into yourself for a deep answerCollection: Writing
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you.Collection: Grief
At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.Collection: Autumn
Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.Collection: God
I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.Collection: Spring
More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.Collection: Art
We are the bees of the invisible. We madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.Collection: Honey
Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Sadness
It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.Collection: Infinity
A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.Collection: Art
The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.Collection: Solitude
I live my life in widening circle That reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower. I have been circling for thousands of years, And I still don't know: am I a falcon, A storm, or a great song? [I, 2]Collection: Song
What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.Collection: Solitude
Truly it is glorious, our being here.Collection: Life
All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.Collection: Thinking
So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.Collection: Cities
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.Collection: Earth
To be an artist means not to compute or count.Collection: Mean
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'hierarchies? and even if one of thempressed me against his heart: I would be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothingbut the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,and we are so awed because it serenely disdainsto annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.Collection: Heart
And one of the things I find most moving is the way people with infirmities manage to embrace Life, and from the cool flowers by the wayside reach conclusions about the vast splendour of its great gardens. They can, if their souls' strings are finely tuned, arrive with much less effort at the feeling of eternity; for everything we do, they may dream. And precisely where our deeds end, theirs begin to bear fruit.Collection: Dream
You must change your life.Collection: Changing Your Life
you are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out it's own secretCollection: Inspirational
Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.Collection: Fear
Wishes are recollections coming from the future.Collection: Wish
This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.Collection: Faces
Since I've learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.Collection: Learning
It seems to me that the only way one can be helpful is to extend one's hand to someone else involuntarily, and without ever knowing how useful this will be.Collection: Hands
As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build.Collection: Honey
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. Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.Collection: Philosophy
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 lifeCollection: Art
I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way.Collection: Thinking
If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.Collection: Nature
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.Collection: Eye
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.Collection: Love
Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.Collection: Pain
Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation.Collection: Unbearable
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.Collection: Fall
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.Collection: Patience
Think... of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.Collection: Healing
Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law.Collection: Powerful
You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. ... But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.Collection: Life
What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.Collection: Self