Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke (Austrian Poet)

René Karl Wilhelm Josef Maria Rilke (1875–1926,) who wrote with the pseudonym Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian-Austrian lyric poet. He is regarded as one of the most significant German-speaking literary figures of the Early Modern period.

Born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Rilke was much loved by his mother. She was mourning the death of an earlier daughter a week after birth and dressed Rilke in girl’s clothing to seek to recover the lost girl.

Rilke later pushed himself to the limits of romantic love. He threw himself into many relationships and endless heartbreaks. He even abandoned a wife and daughter. He became the passive lover of many older women, including a princess and many intellectual and aristocratic women (including the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé.)

Rilke’s first work was Das Stunden-Buch (1905; The Book of Hours,) in which death is a central preoccupation. It was inspired by his visits to Russia and written as if by a Russian monk.

During a 12-year sojourn in Paris, he developed the ‘object poem’ used in New Poems (1907–08.) His poetic novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; Sketches of Malte Laurids Brigge) is the portrait of a poet living in poverty in Paris.

During an astonishing three-week burst of creativity, Rilke wrote the Duineser Elegien (1923; translated as Duino Elegies, 1963) and Die Sonette an Orpheus (1923; translated as Sonnets to Orpheus, 1936.) In these best-known works, Rilke sought to define a poet’s spiritual role in the face of transience and death.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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
Topics: Men & Women, Women, Men, Men and Women

Fame is the sum of misapprehensions that accrue around a name.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

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

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

That is the principal thing: not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being in the mood, but always forcibly to convert it into all things.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Getting Going, Inaction, Procrastination

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

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

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

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
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists

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: Difficulty, Love

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Beginnings

The only journey is the journey within.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Life and Living

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not a poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Attitude, Creativity, Boredom

Who is speaking of victory? To survive is everything.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Life

At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn’t as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Adversity, Self-reliance

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Creativity

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

Who’s not sat tense before his own heart’s curtain?
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Worry, Self-Discovery, Anxiety

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: Assurance, Confidence

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

Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Opportunity

If the Angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced her, not by your tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner.
—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

The only journey is the one within.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Success & Failure, Success, Journeys

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

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

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