Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke—better known as Rainer Maria Rilke—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,...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth4 December 1875
CountryGermany
Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer.
Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.
Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.
Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism.
Those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.
My eyes already touch the sunny hill. Going far ahead of the road I have begun. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has inner light, even from a distance- and charges us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are; a gesture waves us on answering our own wave... but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.
Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.
...a carefree letting go of oneself, not a caution, but a wise blindness.
Learn to love the questions themselves.
If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.
That is longing: To dwell in the flux of things, To have no home in the present. And these are wishes: gentle dialogues Of the poor hours with eternity.
Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act.
Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.