Rainer Maria Rilke - Quodid

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Picture of Rainer Maria Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet. Acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language. His work is viewed by critics and scholars as possessing undertones of mysticism, exploring themes of subjective experience and disbelief. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry, several volumes of correspondence and a few early novellas.

Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

solitude alone spirituality

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. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

life patience questions ignorance

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

connection nature home

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

risk danger art

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

fear angels devils flight

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts, and the scenery is falling apart.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

heart scenery cohesion

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

solitude love relationship

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Who knows? perhaps the same / bird echoed through both of us / yesterday, separate, in the evening . . .

—Rainer Maria Rilke

If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Nights of anguish. Inconsolable sisters, why did I not kneel more to greet you, lose myself more in your loosened hair?

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty... Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.

—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

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