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
A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
it is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
Be patient with all that is unsolved in your life. Learn to love the questions themselves, until some distant day, without your knowing, you will have lived into the answers.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves...At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer.
Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation. You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold, comes at long last over everyone.
What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. 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...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.
God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.