Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “How good it is to be among reading people. Why are they not always like that? You can go up to one of them and touch him lightly; he feels nothing. And if in rising, you chance to bump lightly against a neighbor and excuse yourself, he nods toward the side from which he hears your voice, his face turns toward you and does not see you, and his hair is like that of a man asleep. How comforting that is.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

452. “No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be “happy” – once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

453. “Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

454. “Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

455. “There is but one solitude, and that is great and not easy to bear, and to almost everybody come hours when they would gladly exchange it for any sort of intercourse, however banal and cheap, for the semblance of some slight accord with the first comer, with the unworthiest... But perhaps those are the very hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of springtimes.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

456. “Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows’ wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

457. “Even on days when fate wishes to bestow boundless gifts on them, most people make mistakes in accepting: they don’t accept straightforwardly and consequently lose something while doing so, they take with a secondary purpose in mind, or they accept what is given to them as if they were being compensated for something else.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

458. “My God, if any of it could be shared! But would it “be” then, would it “be”? No, it “is” only at the price of solitude.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

459. “And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnesses, gather depth and strength for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

460. “If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place. And even if you were in a prison whose walls did not let any sound of the world outside reach your senses – would you not have your childhood still, this marvellous, lavish source, this treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention towards that.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

461. “What poet’s persuasion can reconcile the length of those days with the brevity of life?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

462. “Perform no miracles for me, But justify Thy laws to me Which, as the years pass by me. All soundlessly unfold.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

463. “If, however, he is the most perfect one, would not what is less than perfect precede him, so that he can choose himself from great abundance?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

464. “Why must a man be always taking on Things not his own, as if he were a servant whose marketing-bag grows heavier and heavier from stall to stall and, loaded down, he follows and doesn’t dare ask: Master, why this banquet?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

465. “Riding, riding, riding, through the dag, through the night, through the day. And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

466. “Basically, if it is good, one can’t live to see it recognized: otherwise it’s just half good and not reckless enough...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

467. “I believe that almost all our sorrows are moments of tension which we experience as a paralysis, because we no longer hear our estranged feelings living. Because we are alone with the strange thing that has entered into us; because for a moment everything familiar and customary has been taken from us; because we stand in the middle of a crossing where we cannot remain standing.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

468. “Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

469. “These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

470. “I believe that love remains so strong and powerful in your memory because it was your first deep experience of solitariness and the first inner work that you undertook on your life.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

471. “Nothing makes it more difficult to help than the intention of doing so.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

472. “Rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and clam before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

473. “Somehow I had a premonition of what I so often felt at later times: that you did not have the right to open a single book unless you engaged to read them all. With every line you read, you were breaking off a portion of the world. Before books, the world was intact, and afterwards it might be restored to wholeness once again. But how was I, who could not read, to take up the challenge laid down by all of them?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

474. “You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

475. “If you hold close to nature, to what is simple in it, to the small things people hardly see and which all of a sudden can become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is slight, and quite unassumingly, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor – then everything will grow easier, more unified and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the intellect, which, amazed, remains a step behind, but in your deepest consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

476. “Each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following but also alter the past within us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

477. “Whatever happens, your life will find its own paths from that point on, and that they may be good, productive and far-reaching is something I wish for you more than I can say.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

478. “I am able more and more to make use of that long patience you have taught me by your tenacious example; that patience which, disproportionate to ordinary life which seems to bid us haste, puts us in touch with all that surpasses us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

479. “There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words: all we end up with there is more or less felicitous misunderstandings. Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

480. “But your solitude, even in the midst of quite foreign circumstances, will be a hold and a home for you, and leading from it you will find all the paths you need.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

481. “Through love and through death, our innate ability to transform the loss of control is activated to bring forth a deeper awareness of life.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

482. “People have tended to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light and on the lightest side of the light; but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

483. “All of our true relationships, all of our enduring experiences touch upon and pass through everything, Sidie, through life and death. We must live in both, be intimately at home in both.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

484. “Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

485. “Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

486. “Everything assigned to us is a challenge; nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

487. “In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive and lend it grandeur and height.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

488. “You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

489. “It is good to hear all of this and to see it and to seize it, not to become numb toward it but on the contrary: everything is to be felt in countless ways in all its variations yet without losing ourselves to it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

490. “It is quite rare to encounter a truly creative and productive person who resides in his own stillness or simply in the midst of his melody, close to the honest beating of his heart!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

491. “Solitude is not merely a matter of being alone: it is a territory to be entered and occupied.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

492. “Art means to be oblivious to the fact that the world already exists and to create one.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

493. “We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

494. “You become more protective and more capable of granting protection exactly to the extent that you have lost and now lack protection. The solitude into which you were cast so violently makes you capable of balancing out the loneliness of others to exactly the same degree.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke