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
Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms.
Fig tree, how long it's been full meaning for me, the way you almost entirely omit to flower and into the seasonably-resolute fruit uncelebratedly thrust your purest secret. Like the tube of a fountain, your bent bough drives the sap downwards and up: and it leaps from its sleep, scarce waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement.
And one of the things I find most moving is the way people with infirmities manage to embrace Life, and from the cool flowers by the wayside reach conclusions about the vast splendour of its great gardens. They can, if their souls' strings are finely tuned, arrive with much less effort at the feeling of eternity; for everything we do, they may dream. And precisely where our deeds end, theirs begin to bear fruit.
The flower bends when the wind wants it to, and you must become like that-that is, filled with deep # trust .
Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom.
Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.
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.
Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.
That is the principle thing - not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it into all things
These soft nights hold me like themselves aloft and I lie without a lover.
...perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
One must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.
I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.
A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.