Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

402. “Is it not peculiar that nearly all of the great philosophers and psychologists have always paid attention to the earth and nothing but the earth? Would it not be more sublime to lift our eyes from this crumb, and instead of considering a speck of dust in the universe, to turn our attention to space itself?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

403. “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

404. “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

405. “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

406. “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; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

407. “Then take your fate upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking for that reward which might come from without. For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

408. “Art too is just a way of living.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

409. “We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

410. “Above all marriage is a new task and a new seriousness – a new challenge and a question regarding the strength and kindness of each participant and a new great danger for both.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

411. “Those who come together in the night time and entwine in swaying delight perform a serious work and gather up sweetness, depth and strength for the song of some poet that is to be, who will rise to tell of unspeakable bliss.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

412. “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?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

413. “What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

414. “In the depths all becomes law.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

415. “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

416. “Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

417. “Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

418. “Nowhere, beloved, can world be but within us. Our life passes in transformation. And the external dwindles away.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

419. “If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during their honest struggles with each other, that is, in the edges of their passion that became ragged and sharp when it cooled and set, if they could stay fluid, active, flexible, and changeable in all of their interactions and relations, and, in a word, if a mutually human and friendly consideration remained available to them, then their decision to separate cannot easily conjure disaster and terror.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

420. “It should either have passed away with my childhood, or my childhood should have flowed away from it later, leaving it behind, real among all the rest of reality, something to see and objectively tell, like a thing in Cezanne, incomprehensible for all I care, but tangible.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

421. “I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What’s the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I’m changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it’s obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can’t possibly write to strangers.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

422. “Think... of the world which you carry within yourself... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

423. “Things are not as easy to understand or express as we are mostly led to believe; most of what happens cannot be put into words and takes place in a realm which no word has ever entered.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

424. “In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

425. “It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

426. “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

427. “Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

428. “Perhaps it requires of you precisely this existential anxiety in order to begin. Precisely these days of transition are perhaps the period when everything in you is working...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

429. “What we do battle with is so small, what battles us is so large...”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

430. “And those, who come together in the night and are twined in quivering pleasure, are performing a serious work and are heaping up sweetness, depth and force for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to express inexpressible ecstasies.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

431. “Fame – the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

432. “I would finally just like to advise you to grow through your development quietly and seriously; you can interrupt it in no more violent manner than by looking outwards, and expecting answer from outside to questions which perhaps only your innermost feeling in your most silent hour can answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

433. “One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

434. “There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

435. “For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

436. “Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

437. “And more than that: you are also the doctor responsible for looking after himself. But with all illnesses there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

438. “The more we speak of solitude, the clearer it becomes that at the bottom it is not something one can choose to take or leave. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself about it and act as if it were not so. That is all. But it is so much better to see that we are so, indeed even to presuppose it. It will make us dizzy, of course; because all the focal points on which our eyes were used to resting are taken away from us, there is nothing near us anymore, and everything distant is infinitely distant.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

439. “He who understands one thing understands everything, for the same laws are in all.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

440. “I always feel: when one person is indebted to another for something very special, that indebtedness should remain a secret between just the two of them.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

441. “But everything that we encounter is so very much of one piece, and so intimately related to everything else, and has given birth to itself, grows, and is then raised so much to come into its own, that we basically just need to be there, if only unassumingly, if only authentically, the way the earth is there in its affirmation of the seasons, light and dark and wholly in space, longing to be supported by nothing but that web of influences and forces where the stars feel secure.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

442. “Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

443. “In the room... they are inside the books. They move sometimes within the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

444. “I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

445. “Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

446. “Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows’ wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

447. “There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

448. “How good it is to be among reading people. Why are they not always like that? You can go up to one of them and touch him lightly; he feels nothing. And if in rising, you chance to bump lightly against a neighbor and excuse yourself, he nods toward the side from which he hears your voice, his face turns toward you and does not see you, and his hair is like that of a man asleep. How comforting that is.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

449. “No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be “happy” – once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

450. “We are unspeakably alone.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke