René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (born December 4, 1875, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary – died December 29, 1926, Montreux, Vaud, Switzerland), better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet and novelist, considered one of the greatest poets in the German language of the 20th century.
Rilke’s most prominent works include the poetry collections The Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch, 1905), Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien, 1923), and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus, 1923), the poem The Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke (Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, 1912), the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910), and a collection of ten letters under the title Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter, 1929).
Although most of his works were in German, he wrote over 400 poems in French. Regarded as a master of verse, Rilke wrote both verse and highly lyrical prose.
The love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.Letter Seven (May 14, 1904), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.Letter Eight (August 12, 1904), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.Letter Nine (November 4, 1904), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.The Man Watching (1901)
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, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.Letter Four (July 16, 1903), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.Letter Seven (May 14, 1904), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.Letter Eight (August 12, 1904), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
There are a great many people, but there are a great many more faces, for every person has several.The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
There are so many things some old man should tell one about while one is little; for when one has grown up, knowing them would be a matter of course.Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé (May 12, 1904)
There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.Letter to Paula Modersohn-Becker (February 12, 1902)
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.Section I. The Book of Monastic Life, The Book of Hours (1905)
No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.Letter Three (April 23, 1903), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind.Letter Four (July 16, 1903), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
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 connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.Worpswede (1903)
The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise.Letter Eight (August 12, 1904), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. First Elegy, Duino Elegies (1922)
The future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens.Letter Eight (August 12, 1904), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Work of the eyes is done, begin heartwork now on those images in you.Turning Point (Paris, June 20, 1914)
Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.Letter to Witold Hulewicz (November 13, 1925)
Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.Section I. The Book of Monastic Life, The Book of Hours (1905)
I want to know my own will and to move with it. And I want, in the hushed moments when the nameless draws near, to be among the wise ones – or alone.Section I. The Book of Monastic Life, The Book of Hours (1905)
Spring has come again. The earth is like a child who knows poems by heart.Part I, Sonnet 21, Sonnets to Orpheus (1923)
Slowly the evening puts on the garments held for it by a rim of ancient trees.The First Book, Part Two, Evening, The Book of Images (1902)
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. 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.Letter Seven (May 14, 1904), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.Section I. The Book of Monastic Life, The Book of Hours (1905)
Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.Section I. The Book of Monastic Life, The Book of Hours (1905)
If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.Letter One (February 17, 1903), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. Letter Four (July 16, 1903), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
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.Section II. The Book of Pilgrimage, The Book of Hours (1905)
Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.Letter Three (April 23, 1903), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Don’t think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.Letter Eight (August 12, 1904), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
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.Letter to Clara Rilke (June 24, 1907)
Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.Letter Eight (August 12, 1904), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
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.No source