Rainer Maria Rilke
You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house - , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon, - you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening.Collection: Country
May I strike my heart's keys clearly, and may none fail because of slack, uncertain, or fraying strings. May the tears that stream down my face make me more radiant: may my hidden weeping bloom.... How we waste our afflictions!... [T]hey're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year—; not only a season—: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.Collection: Heart
I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life.Collection: Beautiful
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours-that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child.Collection: Children
The future must enter you long before it happens.Collection: Long
Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.Collection: Tasks
A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world's.Collection: Heart
He who understands one thing understands everything, for the same laws are in all.Collection: Law
You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.Collection: Long
The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.Collection: Sex
We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.Collection: Giving
Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.Collection: Creating
It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.Collection: Struggle
Be of good courage all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost...What is required of us is that we live the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.Collection: Hands
Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of thingsCollection: Misled
Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant.Collection: Pain
Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.Collection: Beautiful
You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Memories
Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.Collection: Challenges
I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.Collection: Believe
Shattered people are best represented by bits and pieces.Collection: People
May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith.Collection: Faith
As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.Collection: Moving
And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.Collection: Heart
Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed.Collection: Grief
... be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.Collection: Solitude
Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.Collection: Children
Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.Collection: Luxury
If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.Collection: Mean
One of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor and innocence.Collection: Want
Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.Collection: Gone
Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.Collection: People
Now for some heartwork.Collection: Heart
Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains.Collection: Strong
For bel.i.eve me, the more one is, the richer is all one experiences. And whoever wants to have deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey.Collection: Inspirational
Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!Collection: Ocean
My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths, and at that, the one that will be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because Death’s note wants to climb over— but in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on, beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him.Collection: Spring
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home. Speak and attest. More than ever the things we can live with are falling away, and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image. Will beneath crusts which readily crack whenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders.Collection: Fall
Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.Collection: Dove
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.Collection: Party
As the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.Collection: Arrows
Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.Collection: Arrows
To be in circumstances that are working upon us, that from time to time place us in front of great natural Things - that is all we need.Collection: Needs
People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition.Collection: People
Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.Collection: Book