Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

152. “And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses – would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

153. “Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

154. “Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

155. “Truly to sing, that is a different breath.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

156. “The most visible joy can only reveal itself to us when we’ve transformed it, within.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

157. “Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

158. “When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

159. “She followed slowly, taking a long time, As though there were some obstacles in the way; And yet: as though, once it was overcome, She would be beyond all walking, and would fly.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

160. “Space for the Spirit to breathe.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

161. “Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

162. “Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

163. “The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

164. “Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves despite all opposition.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

166. “More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

167. “One of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn’t want to rob them of their candor and innocence.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

168. “Now for some heartwork.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

169. “That is the principal thing-not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

170. “Earth, is not this what you will: in us to rise up invisible? Is it, O Earth, not your dream once to be wholly invisible? Earth! Invisible! What, if not change, is your desperate mission?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

171. “Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

172. “They, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

173. “Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

174. “Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

175. “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

176. “Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

177. “Girls, there are poets who learn from you to say, what you, in your aloneness, are; and they learn through you to live distantness, as the evenings through the great stars become accustomed to eternity.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

178. “Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

179. “Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

180. “Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

181. “You must realise that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

182. “We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

183. “In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

184. “But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

185. “Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

186. “Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

187. “I feel it now: there’s a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

188. “Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

189. “Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant path, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

190. “Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

191. “There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

192. “Pleas don’t above all, plant me in your heart. I grow to quick.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

193. “Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

194. “Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

195. “One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next moment a star!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

196. “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. Death stands before eternity and says YES.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

197. “Look: the trees exist; the houses we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we pass by it all, like a rush of air. And everything conspires to keep quiet about us, half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

198. “I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

199. “As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

200. “Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know every bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke