Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

257. “What batters you becomes your strength.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

260. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

262. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

265. “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

266. “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

267. “Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over – one of them, ah, even one, is already too much for my blood. Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

268. “Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

269. “If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself, Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

270. “If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

271. “Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

272. “We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

273. “Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

274. “You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

275. “This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple ‘I must’ then build your lfie according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

276. “It is still this death which continues inside of me, which works in me, which transforms my heart, which deepens the red of my blood, which bears down heavily on the life that had been ours so that this death becomes a bittersweet drop coursing through my veins and permeating everything, and which ought to be mine forever.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

277. “Wanting to change, to improve, a person’s situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

278. “Our own heart always exceeds us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

279. “The longer i live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

280. “To be in circumstances that are working upon us, that from time to time place us in front of great natural Things – that is all we need.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

281. “I believe that nothing that is real can pass away.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

282. “Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out; like sicknesses that are superficially and foolishly treated they simply withdraw and after a little pause break out again the more dreadfully; and accumulate within one and are life, are unlived, spurned, lost life, of which one may die.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

283. “The main thing was to be living. That was the main thing.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

284. “Through love and through death, our innate ability to transform the loss of control is activated to bring forth a deeper awareness of life.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

285. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

286. “For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

287. “We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

288. “Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we’ve ripened none within us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

289. “Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin’s bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

290. “Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable. occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

291. “The inner, what is it: if not intensified sky hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

292. “Only in the realm of Praising should Lament walk, the naiad of the wept-for fountain, watching over the stream of our complaint, to keep it clear upon the very stone that bears the arch of triumph and the altar. –.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

293. “Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

294. “Life – a sexually transmitted terminal condition.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

295. “The world of sexuality it finds is not entirely mature and pure, it is not human enough, only virile, rut, intoxication, restlessness, and weighed down by the old prejudices and arrogance with which men have disfigured and overburdened love.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

296. “Was soll ich mit meinem Munde? Mit meiner Nacht? Mit meinem Tag? Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus, keine Stelle auf der ich lebe.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

297. “A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. Therefore, my dear Sir, I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

298. “I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

299. “Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

300. “Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke