Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

The only journey is the one within.

If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no indifferent place.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If we surrenderedto earth's intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.

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.

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.

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

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

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.

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

A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead

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

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.

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

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

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

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.

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

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

That is the principal thing-not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things.

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.

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.

Wishes are memories coming from our future!

a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

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

Live the questions now.

Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.

God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.

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

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. 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

Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches