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Quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
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
I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me..
– Rainer Maria Rilke
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
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
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
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.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The only journey is the one within.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
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
There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Truly to sing, that is a different breath.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
For one human being to love another that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.
– Rainer Maria Rilke