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
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything.
God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.
Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over...Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart...
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.
And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true.
Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.
The only journey is the one within.