Rainer Maria Rilke quotes

On reflection

“The only journey is the one within.”

“He was a poet and hated the approximate.”

“Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.”

“They more adeptly bend the willow's branches who have experience of the willow's roots.”

“A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.”

On action

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

“When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk on the table: it attracts the dead.”

“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.”

On patience

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

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

On truth

“Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.”

“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.”

On presence

“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.”

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

On acceptance

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

On mind

“All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.”

On death

“Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.”

On anger

“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.”

On genius

“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.”

On solitude

“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.”

On time

“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.”

On love

“Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.”