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
Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.
It seems to me that the only way one can be helpful is to extend one's hand to someone else involuntarily, and without ever knowing how useful this will be.
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
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.
There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.
You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house-- , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening...
As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.
Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.
And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been
Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.
Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.
If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.
To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.