Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

154. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

156. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

158. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

160. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

164. “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

165. “Space for the Spirit to breathe.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

166. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

168. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

170. “The hero is strangely akin to those who die young.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

171. “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

172. “Don’t observe yourself too closely. Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

173. “What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

174. “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

175. “Now for some heartwork.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

176. “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

177. “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

178. “And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

180. “I am like a child who awakes At the light, so safe and secureFree from night’s fears when dawn breaks, In Thee I am ever secure.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

181. “But your solitude will be your home and haven even in the midst of very strange conditions, and from there you will discover all your paths.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “Wishes are memories coming from our future!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

187. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

189. “Success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up of thousands of things, we never fully know what.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

190. “Works of art are born of those who confront danger, who go to the limit of an experience, to a point beyond which no human can go. The farther one ventures, the more distinctive, the more personal, the more unique life becomes.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

191. “Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live with them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

192. “Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

195. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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