Rainer Maria Rilke quotes:

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.

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.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

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

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.

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

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

And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.

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

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.

Often a starwas waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward youout of the distant path, or as you walkedunder an open window, a violinyielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.

There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.

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

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,leaving your room, of which you know every bit;your house is the last before the infinite,whoever you are.

Our heart always transcends us.

There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.

More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.

think: the hero prolongs himself, even his fallingwas only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.

Not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree.

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

And these thingsthat keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient,they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue.They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts,into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walkonly on feelings. That faces upwardand in its mirrorreceives heavenly roads, which travelalong themselves.That has learned to walk upon waterwhen it scoops,that walks upon wells,transfiguring every path.That steps into other hands,changes those that are like itinto a landscape:wanders and arrives within them,fills them with arrival."

And many a day's hours were like that. As if someone fashioned my likeness somewherein order to torment it slowly with needles.I felt each sharp prick of his playing,and it was: as if a rain fell on mein which all things change."

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song."

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.

Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act.

a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude

That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.

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 everthing in me that is bewildered and confused.

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

It almost seems as if autumn were the true creator, more creative than the spring, which is too even-toned, more creative when it comes with its will-to-change and shatters the much too ready-made, self-satisfied and really almost bourgeois-complacent image of summer.

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.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart...

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.

Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over...Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush.

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.

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.

The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping is nothing without the continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousandfold assent from Things and animals... beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions.

We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.

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.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.

Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.

[A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

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.

Yield not thy neck To fortune's yoke, but let thy dauntless mind Still ride in triumph over all mischance. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.

Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.

Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

Be ahead of all farewells as if they were behind you, like the winter that is just departing.

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.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

Every angel is terrifying.

There would have to be bread, some rich, whole-grain bread and zwieback, and perhaps on a long, narrow dish some pale Westphalian ham laced with strips of white fat like an evening sky with bands of clouds. There would be some tea ready to be drunk, yellowish golden tea in glasses with silver saucers, giving off a faint fragrance.

We wasters of sorrows! How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our interior year.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.

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.

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

a kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

Everything is gestation and then birthing.

Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life.

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.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question.

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.

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

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.

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner -- what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow

All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.

I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way.

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.

The only journey is the one within.

My art is representational by choice....if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.

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

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.

What keeps you from... living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?

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

But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking, you overpowered their noise with harmony, and from pure destruction arose your transfigured song.

O trees of life, O when are you wintering?We are not unified. We have no instinctslike those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,and fall down to an indifferent lake.We realise flowering and fading together.And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.

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

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.

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been

Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.

Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.

A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead

No se tiene derecho a abrir un libro si no se compromete uno a leerlos todos.

This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple 'I must' then build your lfie according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home.Speak and attest. More than everthe things we can live with are falling away,and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image.Will beneath crusts which readily crackwhenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders.

In marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage, each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude and thus shows him the greatest faith he can bestow.

They all have tired mouthsand bright seamless souls.And a longing (as for sin)sometimes haunts their dreams.They are almost all alike; in God's gardens they keep still,like many, many intervalsin his might and melody.Only when they spread their wingsare they wakers of a wind:as if God with his broad sculptor-hands leafed through the pagesin the dark book of the beginning.

Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us

Think... of the world which you carry within yourself... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.

Only he whose bright lyrehas sounded in shadowsmay, looking onward, restorehis infinite praise. Only he who has eatenpoppies with the deadwill not lose ever againthe gentlest chord.Though the image upon the pooloften grows dim:Know and be still.Inside the Double Worldall voices becomeeternally mild.

What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.

Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the string, collecting itselfto be more than itself as it shoots?

Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor futurelessens . . . . Superabundant existencewells in my heart.

Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.

Wishes are memories coming from our future!

His gaze, bluntedby the unnumbered processionof iron bars, uncountedas his softly padded steps.Smooth motion of blood and sinewturning in its own, small circleprescribed by bars and walls...and skin, confined.Suddenly, without warning,a flash of light and imagepierces the caged brain,and passing through its beating heartto stillness finds its way.

Let everything happen to youBeauty and terrorJust keep goingNo feeling is final