René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist. Profoundly inspirational Rainer Maria Rilke quotes will encourage growth in life, make you wiser and broaden your perspective.
If you’re searching for meaningful quotes by greatest poets that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of profound Rabindranath Tagore quotes, amazing TS Eliot quotes and top Walt Whitman quotes.
Famous Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes
Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you. And without feet I can make my way to you, without a mouth I can swear your name. Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you with my heart as with a hand. Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat. And if you consume my brain with fire, I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood. – 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 now 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 then gradually, without noticing it, 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; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. – Rainer Maria Rilke
When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused. – Rainer Maria Rilke
God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand. – 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
The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can’t reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven… in the ponds broken off from the sky. . . – Rainer Maria Rilke
Death is the side of life which is turned away from us. – Rainer Maria Rilke
If the Angel deigns to appear, it will be because you have convinced him, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning – to be a Beginner! – Rainer Maria Rilke
Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life – Rainer Maria Rilke
Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense’s crossroad. – Rainer Maria Rilke
I am like a child who awakes At the light, so safe and secureFree from night’s fears when dawn breaks, In Thee I am ever secure. – Rainer Maria Rilke
the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Life – a sexually transmitted terminal condition. – Rainer Maria Rilke
And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don’t give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer – Rainer Maria Rilke
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves…At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer. – Rainer Maria Rilke
A carefree letting go of oneself, not a caution, but a wise blindness. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. – Rainer Maria Rilke
For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences. – Rainer Maria Rilke
What batters you becomes your strength. – Rainer Maria Rilke
We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us. – Rainer Maria Rilke
I live my life in widening circle That reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower. I have been circling for thousands of years, And I still don’t know: am I a falcon, A storm, or a great song? [I, 2] – Rainer Maria Rilke
May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Our heart always transcends us. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Inspirational Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens . . . . Superabundant existence wells in my heart. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing placed under profound laws, and when he goes out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then all status drops from him as from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of sheer life. – Rainer Maria Rilke
There is time only to work slowly There is no time not to love – Rainer Maria Rilke
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always. – Rainer Maria Rilke
The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude. – 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
Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence. – Rainer Maria Rilke
And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been – Rainer Maria Rilke
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. – Rainer Maria Rilke
What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin’s bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings. – Rainer Maria Rilke
I am too alone in the world and not alone enough to make every moment holy. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Read as little as possible of literary criticism – such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. – Rainer Maria Rilke
I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee too. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it. – Rainer Maria Rilke
I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes on Life, Love, Friendship and Solitude
All companionship can consist in only the strengthening of neighboring solitudes, giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to become closer to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling – I have learned over and over again, there is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help. – Rainer Maria Rilke
I am so glad you are here. It helps me realize how beautiful my world is. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers. – 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
And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Life is heavier than the weight of all things. – Rainer Maria Rilke
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows. – Rainer Maria Rilke
One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next moment a star! – Rainer Maria Rilke
you are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out it’s own secret – Rainer Maria Rilke
Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn’t intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom. – Rainer Maria Rilke
It is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Just keep going – no feeling is final. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Irony: Don’t let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. – Rainer Maria Rilke
To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them. They change the world. – Rainer Maria Rilke
You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity. – Rainer Maria Rilke
We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Be of good courage all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost…What is required of us is that we live the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Thus we live, forever taking leave. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom. – Rainer Maria Rilke
A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude – Rainer Maria Rilke
What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you. – Rainer Maria Rilke
The moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Don’t observe yourself too closely. Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. – Rainer Maria Rilke
If my devils are to leave me, I’m afraid my angels will take flight as well. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Understand, I’ll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I’ll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows with only this one dream: You come too. – Rainer Maria Rilke
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible. – Rainer Maria Rilke
If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. – Rainer Maria Rilke
There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult. – Rainer Maria Rilke
There is only one journey. Going inside yourself. – Rainer Maria Rilke
When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small. – Rainer Maria Rilke
I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false. – Rainer Maria Rilke
The flower bends when the wind wants it to, and you must become like that-that is, filled with deep #? trust . – Rainer Maria Rilke
Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading! – Rainer Maria Rilke
Go into yourself. Dig into yourself for a deep answer – Rainer Maria Rilke
Lord, it is time. The summer was very big. Lay thy shadow on the sundials, and on the meadows let the winds go loose. Command the last fruits that they shall be full; give them another two more southerly days, press them on to fulfillment and drive the last sweetiness into the heavenly wine. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves despite all opposition. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being. – 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
All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy. – Rainer Maria Rilke
If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable. – Rainer Maria Rilke
And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true. – Rainer Maria Rilke
It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Whoever does not, sometimes or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. – Rainer Maria Rilke
To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure. – Rainer Maria Rilke
It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case. – Rainer Maria Rilke
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final – Rainer Maria Rilke
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
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. – Rainer Maria Rilke
If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself. – 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
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Space for the Spirit to breathe. – Rainer Maria Rilke
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you. – Rainer Maria Rilke
The point is to live everything. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation. – Rainer Maria Rilke
The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one – this one must be able to attain. – Rainer Maria Rilke
All things want to float. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. – Rainer Maria Rilke
No, we don’t accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness. – Rainer Maria Rilke
And isn’t the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything. – Rainer Maria Rilke
And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been – Rainer Maria Rilke
You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world. – Rainer Maria Rilke
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing. – 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
Look, we don’t love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final – Rainer Maria Rilke
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. …live in the question. – Rainer Maria Rilke
