RMRainer Maria Rilke

265 collected words

Rainer Maria Rilke

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

02Undated

Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

03Undated

Who shows a child, just as they are? Who sets itin its constellation, and gives the measureof distance into its hand? Who makes a child’s deathout of grey bread, that hardens, - or leaves itinside its round mouth like the coreof a shining apple? Killers areeasy to grasp. But this: death,the whole of death, before life,to hold it so softly, and not live in anger,cannot be expressed.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

04Undated

To retreat into oneself and meet nobody for hours on end—that is what one must be able to attain. To be alone, as one was alone as a child, when the grown-ups walked about involved in things which seemed great and important, because big people looked so busy and because one could comprehend nothing of their doings. And when one day one realises that their affairs are paltry, their professions benumbed and no longer connected with life, why not still like a child look upon them as something strange from without the depth of one's own world, regarding them from the immunity of one's own loneliness, which is itself work, position and profession? Why desire to exchange a child's wise incomprehension for self-defence and disdain? Incomprehension is loneliness, but self-defence and disdain are participation in that from which one is trying to separate oneself by these means.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

05Undated

And 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, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

06Undated

Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

07Undated

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

08Undated

Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight, something more than itself?

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

09Undated

Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the string, collecting itselfto be more than itself as it shoots?

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

10Undated

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor futurelessens . . . . Superabundant existencewells in my heart.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

11Undated

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

12Undated

Angels often do now know whether they walk among the dead or living.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

13Undated

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.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

14Undated

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

15Undated

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

16Undated

Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

17Undated

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

18Undated

Wishes are memories coming from our future!

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

19Undated

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home.Speak and attest. More than everthe things we can live with are falling away,and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image.Will beneath crusts which readily crackwhenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

20Undated

No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it,but longing to degrade not even death;we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends,to feel its hands about us like a friend's.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

21Undated

That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

22Undated

they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

23Undated

The one so loved that a single lyreraised more lament than lamenting women ever did;and that from the lament a world arose in whicheverything was there again: woods and valleyand path and village, field and river and animal;and around this lament-world, just asaround the other earth, a sunand a starry silent heaven turned,a lament-heaven of disordered stars -- :This one so loved.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote

24Undated

so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more thananything else.

Rainer Maria Rilke / quote