René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, also known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet and novelist who lived from 4 December 1875 to 29 December 1926. He is well known as a significant writer in the German language and has received praise for being an eccentric and expressive poet.
His work has been characterized by critics and academics as having mystic overtones and examining themes of subjective experience and skepticism. A novel, several poetry collections, and numerous volumes of correspondence are all part of his body of work.
72 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes
- “Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.”
2. “Everything terrible is something that needs our love.”
3. “Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.”
4. “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
5. “The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.”
6. “Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”
7. “Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers. ”
8. “Everything is gestation and then birthing.”
9. “Every angel is terrifying.”
10. “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
11. “It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.”
12. “If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow”
13. “This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.”
14. “Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.”
15. “If one think he can live without writing, perhaps he should not write at all.”
16. “I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.”
17. “We lead our lives so poorly because we arrive in the present always unprepared, incapable, and too distracted for everything.”
18. “Shattered people are best represented by bits and pieces.”
19. “Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”
20. “Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
21. “It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.”
22. “Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.”
23. “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”
24. “How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?”
25. “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.”
26. “Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.”
27. “Don’t you see that everything that happens is always a beginning again.”
28. “I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.”
29. “You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.”
30. “There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.”
31. “Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things.”
32. “Life is heavier than the weight of all things.”
33. “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
34. “It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.”
35. “We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash.”
36. “To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.”
37. “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
38. “I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way.”
39. “You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.”
40. “As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.”
41. “I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.”
42. “The only journey is the one within.”
43. “That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.”
44. “Don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.”
45. “My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.”
46. “What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.”
47. “It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.”
48. “We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.”
49. “Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.”
50. “Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.”
A Must Read – Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Rilke
I adore this book so much and think everyone should read it. For those who write poetry, stories, or are artists of any kind, this book is a great source of inspiration. Rilke’s words can make it clear why one should create at any age.
More Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes
51. “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
52. “Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.”
53. “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.”
54. “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.”
55. “We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.”
56. “The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.”
57. “Your life will no doubt find its own paths. That they be good ones, and rich and expansive, that I wish for you more than I can say.”
58. “Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.”
59. “Live the questions now”
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60. “When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.”
61. “Nothing makes it more difficult to help than the intention of doing so.”
62. “But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.”
63. “All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.”
64. “All things want to float.”
65. “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.”
66. “I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.”
67. “Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.”
68. “For the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indiferent place.”
69. “If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.”
70. “Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all, love them.”
71. “Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous.”
72. “Just be sure that you observe carefully what wells up within you and place that above everything that you notice around you.”
Rilke traveled widely throughout Europe and later made his home in Switzerland, which played a significant role in the creation and inspiration of many of his poems. Rilke also wrote in French, though he is best known for his contributions to German literature.
The poetry collections Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), and a collection of ten letters published after his passing under the title Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter) are some of his best Through the use of his work by self-help authors and frequent citations in television programs, books, and movies in the later 20th century, his work attracted new audiences.
Additional Read: