Top 450 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “The future stands firm... but we move in infinite space.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

403. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

405. “Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and as nearly as possible, the definitive utterance of this singularity.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

406. “I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

407. “A world will come over you, the happiness, the abundance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world. Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times, and however your life may turn, – it will, I am certain of it, run through the fabric of your growth as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experience, disappointments and joys.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

408. “Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the grown-ups? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

410. “It is you; you are the light around these familiar intimate things.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

411. “There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

412. “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

413. “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

414. “Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

415. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

424. “In the depths all becomes law.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

446. “We are unspeakably alone.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

447. “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

448. “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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

450. “Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke