Austria, 1875–1926
Rainer Maria Rilke
German-language poet of inwardness. The Duino Elegies and Letters to a Young Poet remain touchstones for anyone learning to listen to their own life.
Rainer Maria Rilke in 22 lines
Every Rainer Maria Rilke passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves.”
“The only journey is the one within.”
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
“All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.”
“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”
“He was a poet and hated the approximate.”
“Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.”
“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”
“Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.”
“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.”
“Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.”
“Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.”
“We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power.”
“A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence! Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear! And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.”
“They more adeptly bend the willow's branches who have experience of the willow's roots.”
“When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk on the table: it attracts the dead.”
“A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.”
“I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.”
“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; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
“Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in unproductive moments. In productive ones try to make use of it as one more means of seizing life.”
“Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.”
“If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.”
Where Rainer Maria Rilke lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
Your workplace rewards a version of you that feels false.
You are choosing long-term wholeness over short-term fit. The danger is making escape do the work that courage should do.
More money would help, but the chase is changing your days.
You are widening the ledger to include the goods money can serve but not replace. The danger is becoming vague about real obligations.
You are good at something you no longer love.
You are looking for a form where skill and sincerity can meet. The risk is postponing a clean break with elegant compromise.
You have been alone long enough that you cannot tell which it is.
You are refusing to medicate a state before understanding it. The cost is that inspection can deepen what it examines.
A grief has not moved in a long time and people expect it to.
You are refusing to pathologise a continuing attachment. The cost is a life organised around a room you will not leave.
You got the thing you wanted and it did not land.
You are letting the emptiness say what it came to say. The danger is stillness that curdles into inertia.
Reading Rainer Maria Rilke today
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in 1875–1926, from Austria — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Rainer Maria Rilke is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 22 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Albert Camus — France/Algeria, 1913–1960
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Bertrand Russell — UK, 1872–1970
- Carl Jung — Switzerland, 1875–1961
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
- Hannah Arendt — Germany & United States, 1906–1975
Argues the same cases
Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Jean-Paul Sartre, Søren Kierkegaard, Henry David Thoreau, John Locke take positions on the same dilemmas as Rainer Maria Rilke, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.