Rainer maria rilke quotes

Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life.

You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born.

Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?

There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.

and I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song

Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Always trust yourself and your own feelings, as opposed to arguments and discussions. If it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights.

When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everthing in me that is bewildered and confused.

What happens most deeply inside you is worthy of your whole love.

And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything.

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

What batters you becomes your strength.

Just keep going - no feeling is final.

Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.

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.

Life + a cat ... adds up to an incalculable sum.

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them.

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess of that precious nourishing love from which flowers and children have their strength and which could help all human beings if they would take it without doubting.

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.

Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.

Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.

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.

Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.

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.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.

Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

The only journey is the one within.

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.

Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final

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.

No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.

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.

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.

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.

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.

And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true.

We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash.

May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith.

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.

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.

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 secret

Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.

I believe that nothing that is real can pass away.

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

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.

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 life

Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over...Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush.

You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.

You must think that something is happening upon you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.

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.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don't come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time.

If the Angel deigns to appear, it will be because you have convinced him, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning — to be a Beginner!

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.

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.

Life - a sexually transmitted terminal condition.

We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.

Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.

I am so glad you are here. It helps me realize how beautiful my world is.

Everything terrible is something that needs our love.

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.

To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.

I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.

She followed slowly, taking a long time, As though there were some obstacles in the way; And yet: as though, once it was overcome, She would be beyond all walking, and would fly.

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

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.

The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.

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.

All companionship can consist in only the strengthening of neighboring solitudes, giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to become closer to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling – I have learned over and over again, there is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another.

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.

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread

I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life.

Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.

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.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Where I create, there I am true.

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!

Wishes are recollections coming from the future.

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.

I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.

To be here is immense.

Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

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.

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.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.

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.

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.

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.

Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.

Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation.

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.

The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.

The point is to live everything.

Life is heavier than the weight of all things.

Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things

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.

I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way.

Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.

Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom.

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

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.

Think... of the world you carry within you.

As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build.

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.

You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait.

Since I've learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.