51 quotes
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.
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them.
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990)
I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire,
To be no one's sleep under so many
Lids.
Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.
All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.
Wartime Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1914-1921 (1940)
Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.
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.
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Slowly the evening changes into the clothes
held for it by a row of ancient trees.
Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images) (1902)
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.
Duino Elegies (1922)
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.
He [Cézanne] 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.
A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
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.
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
They more adeptly bend the willow's branches
who have experience of the willow's roots.
Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)
When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk
on the table: it attracts the dead.
Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)