Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The artist’s experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

102. “Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

103. “Always trust yourself and your own feelings, as opposed to arguments and discussions. If it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

104. “I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

105. “If my devils are to leave me, I’m afraid my angels will take flight as well.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

106. “As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

107. “Life and death: they are one, at core entwined. Who understands himself from his own strain presses himself into a drop of wine and throws himself into the purest flame.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

108. “Look, we don’t love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

109. “Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

110. “That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

111. “Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner – what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

112. “We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard – of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

113. “It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

114. “As the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

115. “Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

116. “I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

117. “Thus we live, forever taking leave.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

118. “Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

119. “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.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

120. “All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

121. “Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

122. “We wasters of sorrows! How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our interior year.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

123. “Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

124. “I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

125. “Every angel is terrifying.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

126. “The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

127. “In the night, I wish to speak with the angel to find out if she recognizes my eyes, if she will ask me: do you see Eden? And I’ll reply: Eden burns.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

128. “Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense’s crossroad...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

129. “But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

130. “Do you remember how life yearned out of childhood toward the “great thing?” I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

131. “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

132. “Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

133. “Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

134. “He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

135. “To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

136. “Resolve to be always beginning-to be a beginner!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

137. “There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

138. “Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

139. “You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

140. “There is time only to work slowly There is no time not to love.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

141. “May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

142. “Draw near to Nature. Then try like some first human being to say what you see and experience and love and lose.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

143. “And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

144. “My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

145. “Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

146. “Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one’s sleep under so many lids.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

147. “Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

148. “Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

149. “Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

150. “Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke