Rainer Maria Rilke
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.Collection: Heart
What do the contours of your body mean, laid out like the lines on a hand, so that I no longer see them except as fate?Collection: Mean
FALLING STARS: Do you remember still the falling stars that like swift horses through the heavens raced and suddenly leaped across the hurdles of our wishes -- do you recall? And we did make so many! For there were countless numbers of stars: each time we looked above we were astounded by the swiftness of their daring play, while in our hearts we felt safe and secure watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate, knowing somehow we had survived their fall.Collection: Horse
Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.Collection: Art
Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.Collection: Song
Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write [create]? Dig into yourself for a deep answer.Collection: Writing
Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be gladCollection: Book
Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair.Collection: Hair
Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom.Collection: Eye
Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.Collection: God
Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.Collection: Greatness
I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.Collection: Dark
It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Whoever does not, sometimes or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Writing
Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.Collection: Destiny
Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.Collection: Letting Go
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.Collection: Talking
Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.Collection: Able
I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each shall 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.Collection: Lying
When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.Collection: Feelings
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.Collection: Relationship
Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.Collection: Names
That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.Collection: Lonely
I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.Collection: Lying
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.Collection: Life
And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.Collection: Believe
Space for the Spirit to breathe.Collection: Space
Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.Collection: Yesterday
They, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.Collection: Fate
Success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up of thousands of things, we never fully know what.Collection: Success
sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.Collection: Children
Earth, is not this what you will: in us to rise up invisible? Is it, O Earth, not your dream once to be wholly invisible? Earth! Invisible! What, if not change, is your desperate mission?Collection: Dream
Why don't you conceive of God as an ally who is coming, who has been approaching since time began, the one who will someday arrive, the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Why not project his birth into the future, and live your life as an excruciating and lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy?Collection: Pregnancy
Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath?Collection: Comfort
Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.Collection: Believe
If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys.Collection: Sadness
Und dasTotsein ist mu« hsam und voller Nachholn, dass man allm a« hlich ein wenig Ewigkeit spu« rt. And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.Collection: Hard Work
Everything in the world of things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.Collection: Animal
So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety - like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in the palm of its hand and will not let you fall.Collection: Faith
Everything is gestation and then birthing.Collection: Gestation
It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone.Collection: Distance
The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.Collection: World
Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.Collection: Love Life
Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?Collection: Writing
In the depths all becomes law.Collection: Law
Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.Collection: Success
Those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.Collection: Tasks
Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism.Collection: Knowing