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
I am like a child who awakes At the light, so safe and secureFree from night's fears when dawn breaks, In Thee I am ever secure.
What we do battle with is so small, what battles us is so large...
A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world's.
I implore those who love me to love my solitude.
She followed slowly, taking a long time, As though there were some obstacles in the way; And yet: as though, once it was overcome, She would be beyond all walking, and would fly.
Life is cut to allow for growth ... one may vigorously put on weight before one fills it out entirely.
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.
Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant path, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
Think... of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.
Live the questions now.
Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow
the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense.