Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

203. “Because I never held you close, I hold you forever.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

204. “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

205. “Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

206. “Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

207. “And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

209. “It is nothing but a breath, the void.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

210. “A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

211. “Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

212. “But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

213. “To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

215. “I’m learning how to see. I don’t know what the reason is, but everything enters into me more deeply and no longer stops at the point where it used to come to an end. I have an inner self that I knew nothing about. Now everything goes into it. I don’t know what happens there.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

216. “Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

217. “Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

218. “Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

219. “The moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

220. “To be silent, to keep myself absolutely hidden, nothing else.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

221. “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

222. “Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

223. “Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

224. “You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

225. “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

226. “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

227. “But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking, you overpowered their noise with harmony, and from pure destruction arose your transfigured song.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

228. “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

229. “If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

230. “We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

231. “And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this: Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

232. “Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

233. “Ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

234. “It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

235. “You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

236. “And you suddenly know: It was here! You pull yourself together, and there stands an irrevocable year of anguish and vision and prayer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

237. “A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

238. “For there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

239. “The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

240. “I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

241. “Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

242. “What batters you becomes your strength.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

243. “What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

244. “Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

245. “It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

246. “Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

247. “I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

248. “Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn’t intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

249. “I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

250. “You know that I am not one of those individuals who neglect their body in order to turn it into an offering for their soul; my soul would not at all have appreciated such a sacrifice.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke