Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Let everything happen to you: Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Life Quotes, Emotional Quotes, Emotion Quotes, Poetry Quotes, Quotes About Feelings

2. “And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Short Positive Quotes, New Beginnings Quotes, Future Quotes, Creative Quotes

3. “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.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Sweet Quotes, Love Life Quotes, Faith Quotes, Quotes About Believing, Love You Quotes

4. “Just keep going – no feeling is final.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Resilience Quotes, Quotes About Feelings

5. “Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

6. “The only journey is the one within.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Self-Care Quotes, Meaning Quotes, Self-Love Quotes, Journey Quotes, Identity Quotes

7. “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Purpose Quotes

8. “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.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Love Is Quotes

9. “I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Patience Quotes, Meaning Quotes, Emotion Quotes, Different Quotes, Book Quotes

10. “If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Meaning Quotes

12. “Be patient with all that is unsolved in your life. Learn to love the questions themselves, until some distant day, without your knowing, you will have lived into the answers.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Lifelong Learning Quotes

13. “Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude – these are everything.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Patience Quotes, Solitude Quotes

14. “I am so glad you are here. It helps me realize how beautiful my world is.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

15. “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.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Empathy Quotes, Life is Hard Quotes, Sorrow Quotes

16. “When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everthing in me that is bewildered and confused.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

17. “Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

18. “I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

19. “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.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

20. “You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

21. “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don’t come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

22. “Live the questions now.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

23. “You must change your life.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

24. “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.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

25. “Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

26. “There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Healing Quotes

27. “Truly it is glorious, our being here.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

28. “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

29. “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.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

30. “Where I create, there I am true.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

31. “I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

32. “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Carpe Diem Quotes

33. “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

34. “The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

35. “I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Quotes About Songs

36. “You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

37. “If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

38. “Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

39. “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

40. “Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Featured in: Challenges Quotes

41. “Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

42. “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.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

43. “If the angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

44. “Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

45. “Don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

46. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

47. “What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

48. “Everything terrible is something that needs our love.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

49. “Go into yourself. Dig into yourself for a deep answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

50. “To be here is immense.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke