Top 489 Quotes & Sayings by Rainer Maria Rilke - Page 3

Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.

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.

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

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.

What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.

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.

One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next moment a star!

Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.

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.

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.

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

Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.

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

Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.

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

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

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.

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

Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.

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.

To be here is immense.

Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense's crossroad.

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

Solitude is nothing that one can choose or retrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.

Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good.

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

I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life.

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.

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.

Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant path, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.

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.

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.

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

Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair.

I am too alone in the world and not alone enough to make every moment holy.

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.

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

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.

I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.

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

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.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

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

We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash.

Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.

Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling... it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.

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.

Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law.

I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

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.

No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.

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.

the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing That is more than your own. Let it brush your cheeks As it divides and rejoins behind you. The trees you planted in childhood have grown Too heavy. You cannot bring them along. Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.

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.

All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.

The future must enter you long before it happens.