Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

352. “The more one is, the more abundant is everything one experiences. If you want to have a deep love in your life, you must save up for it and collect and gather honey.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

353. “To be an artist means not to compute or count...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

354. “There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

355. “If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

356. “And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

357. “May you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

358. “There is no more wretched prison than the fear of hurting someone who loves you.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

359. “Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s curtain?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

360. “Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

361. “Look, lovers: almost separately they come towards us through the flowery grass and slowly; parting’s so far from thought of, they indulge the extravagance of walking unembraced.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

362. “Things are not as easy to understand and say as we might prefer to believe; most events are inexpressible, happening in a space where no word has ever set foot, and most inexpressible of all are works of art, mysterious existences, whose life continues as ours passes away.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

363. “Don’t petals of soft words float upon your blood?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

364. “More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

365. “Let me put aside every desire, so that my heart grows used to its farthest spaces. Better that it live fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than as if protected, soothed by what is near.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

366. “Dance the orange.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

367. “Whether it be the singing of a lamp or the voice of a storm, whether it be the breath of an evening or the groan of the ocean – whatever surrounds you, a broad melody always wakes behind you, woven out of a thousand voices, where there is room for your own solo only here and there. To know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

368. “Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

369. “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

370. “Beauty will become paltry and insignificant when one looks for it only in what is pleasing; there it might be found occasionally but it resides and lies awake in each thing where it encloses itself, and it emerges only for the individual who believes that it is present everywhere and who will not move on until he has stubbornly coaxed it forth.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

371. “For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

372. “Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not lose too much time and too much courage in explaining.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

373. “Why should you want to give up a child’s wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

374. “The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

375. “Live for a while in these books, learn from them what you feel is worth learning, but most of all love them. This love will be returned to you thousands upon thousands of times, whatever your life may become – it will, I am sure, go through the while fabric of your becoming, as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

376. “The essence of love lies not in communion, but in the fact that each partner forces the other to become something, something infinitely great, the extreme limit of his strength.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

377. “Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything;.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

378. “Confess to yourself in the deepest hour of the night whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

379. “Nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. We will gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

380. “So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

381. “To keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your while development; you couldn’t disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to question that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

382. “Have patience with everything unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves. It is possible to live and not know.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

383. “God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

384. “Truly being here is glorious.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

385. “I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

386. “Don’t you see that everything that happens is always a beginning again.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

387. “Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

388. “Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

389. “My old furniture is rotting in a barn where I was permitted to store it, and as for myself, dear God, I don’t have a roof over my head and it is raining into my eyes.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

390. “The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

391. “It seems to me that the only way one can be helpful is to extend one’s hand to someone else involuntarily, and without ever knowing how useful this will be.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

392. “Amid these fading and decaying things, be the glass that rings out as it’s breaking.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

393. “Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

394. “One has to be able at every moment to place one’s hand on the earth like the first human being.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

395. “Stand up during supper and walk outdoors, and keep on walking.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

396. “Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

397. “It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

398. “The future stands firm... but we move in infinite space.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

399. “So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

400. “Perhaps all the dragons of your life are princesses, who are only waiting for us to show a little beauty and courage. Perhaps at the very bottom every horror is something helpless, that wants help from us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke