Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

"All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you."

"All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood."

"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."

"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."

"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night."

"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."

"He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog."

"I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me.."

"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."

"If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty."

"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning."

"Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always."

"Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers."

"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."

"More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed."

"Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky."

"One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one."

"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."

"Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems."

"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further."

"The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing."

"The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings."

"The only journey is the one within."

"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."

"There are quantities of human faces, but there are many more faces, for each person has several."

"There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course."

"There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages."

"This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess."

"Truly to sing, that is a different breath."

"Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart."