Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “All things want to float.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

114. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

116. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

120. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

122. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

124. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

127. “Every angel is terrifying.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

132. “No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

133. “So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

134. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

141. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

144. “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

145. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

148. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke