Who is speaking of victory? To survive is everything.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Life
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
Topics: Confidence, Assurance
Fame is the sum of misapprehensions that accrue around a name.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Resilience
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
Nothing in this world can one imagine beforehand, not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Ignorance
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
Topics: Relationships
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Adversity, Live
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
Topics: Emotions
A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other the guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Marriage
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
Topics: City Life, Cities
Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Creativity
A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above you head. But in you is the presence that will be, when the stars are dead.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Writing
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
Topics: Power
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
Topics: Letting Go
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
Topics: Beginnings
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the question themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Questioning, Try, Self-Discovery, Heart, Love, Spirit, Live, Patience, Questions, Life, Living
Who’s not sat tense before his own heart’s curtain?
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Self-Discovery, Anxiety, Worry
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
Topics: Art
One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Anxiety, Fear
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation … Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person—it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen … to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Love, Difficulty
Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
There is only one journey: going inside yourself.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Everyone once, once only.
Just once and no more.
And we also once.
Never again.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Value of a Day, Time Management
No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Danger
Wanting to change, to improve, a person’s situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Reality, Opportunities
Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes … We must, strictly speaking, at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Change
As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Future
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Franz Kafka Austrian Novelist
- Franz Grillparzer Austrian Dramatist
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach Austrian Novelist
- Ludwig von Mises Austrian Economist
- Alfred Adler Austrian Psychiatrist
- Ludwig Wittgenstein Austrian-born British Philosopher
- Viktor Frankl Austrian Psychiatrist
- Wilhelm Stekel Austrian Physician
- Klemens Wenzel, Prince von Metternich Austrian Political leader
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe German Poet
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