Quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Then suddenly you’re left all alone with your body that can’t love you and your will that can’t save you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.

Rainer Maria Rilke

El amor de un ser humano por otro, es posiblemente la prueba más difícil para cada uno de nosotros.

Rainer Maria Rilke

We, hurt by ourselves, keen to be hurters and keen to be hurt back deep inside. We, like weapons laid beside anger asleep.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The free animal has its dying always behind it and God in front of it, and its way is the eternal way, as the spring flowing. Never, not for a moment, do we have pure space before us, where the flowers endlessly open.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep ...

Rainer Maria Rilke

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

Rainer Maria Rilke

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patie...

Rainer Maria Rilke

Bibliothèque Nationale. Ich sitze und lese einen Dichter. Es sind viele Leute im Saal, aber man spürt sie nicht. Sie sind in den Büchern. Manchmal bewegen sie sich in den Blättern, wie Menschen, die schlafen und sich umwenden zwischen zwei Träum...

Rainer Maria Rilke

When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.

Rainer Maria Rilke

and children are still the way you were ...as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.

Rainer Maria Rilke

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence. I know that my trunk rose from his warmth, but that's all, because my branches hardly move at all near the ground, and ...

Rainer Maria Rilke

And when suddenly the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry, uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ – she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?

Rainer Maria Rilke

Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.

Rainer Maria Rilke

How should we be able to forget those myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just o...

Rainer Maria Rilke

It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Author Bio

  • NameRainer Maria Rilke
  • DescriptionAustrian poet and writer
  • BornDecember 4, 1875
  • DiedDecember 29, 1926
  • CountryGermany; Austria
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Playwright; Translator; Novelist