Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Go into yourself. Dig into yourself for a deep answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

52. “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

53. “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...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

54. “May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

55. “Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

56. “Understand, I’ll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I’ll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows with only this one dream: You come too.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

57. “The point is to live everything.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

58. “Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

59. “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

60. “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

61. “I implore those who love me to love my solitude.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

62. “No feeling is final.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

63. “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.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

64. “If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

65. “Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

66. “Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

67. “A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world’s.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

68. “Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

69. “This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

70. “I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

71. “Life is heavier than the weight of all things.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

72. “Wishes are recollections coming from the future.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

73. “I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

74. “We are the bees of the invisible. We madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

75. “Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

76. “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

77. “Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

78. “A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them – they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

79. “We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

80. “I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

81. “To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

82. “She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

83. “It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

84. “Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

85. “Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

86. “Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

87. “I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

88. “Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

89. “In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

90. “Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

91. “Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

92. “Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

93. “I have patience for centuries in me and will live as though my time were very big.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

94. “We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

95. “This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

96. “Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

97. “How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

99. “All things want to float.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

100. “Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke