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
This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.
But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.
Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question.
Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.
Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!
The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.
Whoever makes himself freer and more human in his own existence is doing his part towards peace.
Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.