Rainer Maria Rilke Quotations
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Rainer Maria Rilke
1875-1926 (Age at death: 51 approx.)
Rene Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 - 29 December 1926)""better known as Rainer Maria Rilke (German: [ˈÊaɪnÉ maˈÊiËa ˈÊɪlkÉ™])""was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described Rilke's work as inherently "mystical". His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry, and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety. These deeply existential themes tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist writers.
Rilke was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, travelled extensively throughout Europe, including Russia, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and in his later years settled in Switzerland""settings that were key to the genesis and inspiration for many of his poems. While Rilke is most known for his contributions to German literature, over 400 poems were originally written in French and dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland. Among English-language readers, his best-known works include the poetry collections Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), and a collection of ten letters that was published after his death under the title Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter). In the later 20th century, his work has found new audiences through its use by New Age theologians and self-help authors, and through frequent quoting in television programs, books and motion pictures. In the United States, Rilke is one of the more popular, best-selling poets""along with 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi and 20th-century Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran.
Author Information from Wikipedia
50 Quotation(s) Total:
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...be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. |
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...be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreigntongue. Do not now seek the answers, that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. |
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...beauty's nothing but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear |
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..the least incident unfolds like a destiny, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide web in which each thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid beside another and held and borne up by a hundred others. |
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..the least incident unfolds like a destiny, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide web in which each thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid beside another and held and borne up by a hundred others. |
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Shall I wonder that life-sized life treats me downright scornfully in such interims, and what in the world is this work if in it one cannot go through and learn everything, if one hangs around outside it allowing oneself to be shoved and pushed, grabbed and let go, becoming involved in happiness and wrong and never understanding anything. [full quote] [add comments] [Rate] [Share] |
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The terrible thing about art is that the further one gets in it, the more it commits one to the highest, almost impossible... [full quote] [add comments] [Rate] [Share] |
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The work of the artist has many dangers and often does not
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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. |
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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. |
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All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood. |
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Every happiness is the child of a separation |
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Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. TO let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion quite in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life-- in understanding as in work. |
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Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion quite in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life-- in understanding as in work. |
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Everything that happens is always beginning again, and could it not be his beginning, since beginning in itself is always so beautiful. |
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Everything that happens is always beginning again, and could it not be his beginning, since beginning in itself is always so beautiful. |
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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. |
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I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several. |
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I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. |
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If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses-- would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention there. Try to bring up... |
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