Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

302. “Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

303. “You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

304. “Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

305. “So you mustn’t be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety – like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in the palm of its hand and will not let you fall.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

306. “And if I have anything else to say to you it is this: do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

307. “Never forget to make a wish, Malte. You should never give up wishing. I believe there is no such thing as fulfillment, but there are wishes, and they go on lasting, your whole lifetime, so that you couldn’t wait long enough for them to be fulfilled even if you wanted to.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

308. “But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

309. “Je mehr Liebe man gibt, desto mehr besitzt man davon.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

310. “How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

311. “Irony: Don’t let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

312. “I would describe myself like a landscape I’ve studied at length, in detail; like a word I’m coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother’s face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

313. “Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own – only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

314. “But this press of time – take it as a little thing next to what endures. All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

315. “Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

316. “Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

317. “What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

318. “If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

319. “Solitude is nothing that one can choose or retrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

320. “Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

321. “No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

322. “In spite of all the farmer’s work and worry, he can’t reach down to where the seed is slowly transmuted into summer. The earth bestows.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

323. “He does not always remain bent over the pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

324. “Weltinnenraum,” “world-inner-space”. It is most often used to speak that essential space within the heart of a human being.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

325. “Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

326. “What do the contours of your body mean, laid out like the lines on a hand, so that I no longer see them except as fate?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

327. “Eating, too, has been turned away from its true nature: want on the one hand and superfluity on the other have troubled the clarity of this need, and all the profound, simple necessities in which life renews itself have similarly been obscured.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

328. “Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

329. “Shattered people are best represented by bits and pieces.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

330. “Whoever makes himself freer and more human in his own existence is doing his part towards peace.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

331. “Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

332. “Beauty is but the beginning of terror. We can barely endure it and are awed when it declines to destroy us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

333. “And yet they are in us, those who have long since passed away, as natural disposition, as burden on our destiny, as blood that throbs, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

334. “If you think your world isn’t poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that’s not because it’s a dull world, that’s because you’re not poet enough to wake its soul up.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

335. “Everything in the world of things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

336. “Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

337. “Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

338. “He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

339. “It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

340. “Painting is something that takes place among the colors.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

341. “And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

342. “Just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

343. “He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

344. “Because he loves only as man, not as human being, there is in his sexual feelings something narrow, seemingly wild, malicious, temporal, finite, which weakens his art and makes it equivocal and dubious.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

345. “His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

346. “The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one – this one must be able to attain.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

347. “I am still soft, and I can be like wax in your hands. Take me, give me a form, finish me.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

348. “Poetry is the past that breaks out in our hearts.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

349. “Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For beauty’s nothing but the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

350. “It is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite necessity of that life and would have been absorbed by it without effort.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke