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
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it
Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
... be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.
Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and great each other.
There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along....
Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.
Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.
it is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.
The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.
I implore those who love me to love my solitude.