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

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

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

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

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.
—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

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Romance

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

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

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

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

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Poets, Poetry, Spring

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

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

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

There is only one journey: going inside yourself.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

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

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

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

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

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

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: Opportunities, Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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: Artists, Art, Arts

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

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