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
you are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out it's own secret
What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.
As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build...
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours-that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child ...
Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don't come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time.
He does not always remain bent over the pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread
Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing placed under profound laws, and when he goes out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then all status drops from him as from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of sheer life.
How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights! Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters, on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.