- Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
- which we are barely able to endure and are awed
- because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
- Each single angel is terrifying.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Duino Elegies
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.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, letter, May 14, 1904, Letters to a Young Poet
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, The Book of Hours
- Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire,
- To be no one's sleep under so many
- Lids.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, his epitaph, composed sometime before Oct. 27, 1925
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, The Book of Hours
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, "I Am Too Alone"
The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, letter, Jul. 16, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet
- Slowly the evening changes into the clothes
- held for it by a row of ancient trees.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, "Evening," The Book of Images
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet
Where I am folded, there I am a lie.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, "I Am Too Alone"
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, letter, Feb. 17, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Wendung
Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Worpswede
- When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk
- on the table: it attracts the dead.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, "Sonnet 6," Sonnets to Orpheus
- Lovers ... when you raise yourselves and press
- your mouths together—drink upon drink:
- strange how each of you drinks your way past the other.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, "Second Elegy," Duino Elegies
- I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
- and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
- to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, "I Am Too Alone"
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet
- Dying is strange and hard
- if it is not our death, but a death
- that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, The Book of Hours
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.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, letter, Feb. 17, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet
- Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
- and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
- and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
- fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
- under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
- among the flowers, face to face with the sky.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, "Again and Again"
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.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, letter to his wife, Jun. 24, 1907, reprinted in Rilke's Letters on Cézanne
The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet
- Ever since those wondrous days of Creation
- our Lord God sleeps: we are His sleep.
- And He accepted this in His indulgence,
- resigned to rest among the distant stars.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, "In the Beginning"
