Quotes By Author: Rainer Maria Rilke
“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.”
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“I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.”
“This is the creature there has never been.They never knew it, and yet, none the less,they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.Not there, because they loved it, it behavedas though it were. They always left some space.And in that clear unpeopled space they savedit lightly reared its head, with scarce a traceof not being there. They fed it, not with corn,but only with the possibilityof being. And that was able to confersuch strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.Whitely it stole up to a maid – to bewithin the silver mirror and in her.”
“Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winterthat only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”
“His vision, from the constantly passing bars,has grown so weary that it cannot holdanything else. It seems to him there area thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,the movement of his powerful soft stridesis like a ritual dance around a centerin which a mighty will stands paralyzed.Only at times, the curtain of the pupilslifts, quietly. An image enters in,rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,plunges into the heart and is gone.”
“And when suddenlythe god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ –she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?”
“O Stunden in der Kindheit,da hinter den Figuren mehr als nurVergangnes war und vor uns nicht die Zukunft.”
“Art too is just a way of living.”
“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”
“You darkness, that I come from,I love you more than all the firesthat fence in the world,for the fire makesa circle of light for everyone,and then no one outside learns of you.But the darkness pulls in everything:shapes and fires, animals and myself,how easily it gathers them! -powers and people -and it is possible a great energyis moving near me.I have faith in nights.”
“I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don’t even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me — the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and un-suspected turns in the path, and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods– all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me. You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house– , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,– you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening… ”