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
No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.
We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.
Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
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.
For it is not simply because of mere sluggishness alone that human relationships repeat themselves from case to case in such unspeakable monotonous and unrefreshed ways; there is also a certain shyness for unforseeable experiences generally because one doesn't feel up for them. But only for the one that is on the lookout for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatic, will the relationship to another become something alive and to speak to the whole potential of one's existence.
For believe me, the more one is, the richer is all that one experiences. And whoever wants to have a deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey.
Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.