Rainer Maria Rilke

From BillionQuotes

Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 - 29 December 1926) is generally considered the German language's greatest poet of the 20th century; born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke.

Sourced

• 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.
  • You who never arrived (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)

• 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...
  • You who never arrived (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)

• The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
  • Turning Point (Wendung) (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)

• What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. 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.
  • Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (1960)

Letters to a Young Poet

• Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
  • Letter Four (July 16, 1903)
  • Variant: Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. 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. (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)

• People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
  To love is good, too: love being difficult. 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.

• Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

• 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. But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence — then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.

The Book of Hours (1905)

• Extinguish my sight, and I can still see you;
  plug up my ears, and I can still hear;
  even without feet I can walk toward you,
  and without mouth I can still implore.
  Break off my arms, and I will hold you
  with my heart as if it were a hand;
  strangle my heart, and my brain will still throb;
  and should you set fire to my brain,
  I still can carry you with my blood.
  • Translated by Annemarie S. Kidder

The Panther (1907)

• His tired gaze - from passing endless bars -
  has turned into a vacant stare which nothing holds.
  To him there seem to be a thousand bars,
  and out beyond these bars exists no world.
  
  His supple gait, the smoothness of strong strides
  that gently turn in ever smaller circles
  perform a dance of strength, centered deep within
  a will, stunned, but untamed, indomitable.
  
  But sometimes the curtains of his eyelids part,
  the pupils of his eyes dilate as images
  of past encounters enter while through his limbs
  a tension strains in silence
  only to cease to be, to die within his heart.
  • Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming

In Celebration of Me (1909)

• I am so afraid of people's words.
  They describe so distinctly everything:
  And this they call dog and that they call house,
  here the start and there the end.
  
  I worry about their mockery with words,
  they know everything, what will be, what was;
  no mountain is still miraculous;
  and their house and yard lead right up to God.
  
  I want to warn and object: Let the things be!
  I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.
  But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.
  That's how you kill.
  • Translated by Annemarie S. Kidder

Duino Elegies(1922)

• Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
  hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
  pressed me against his heart, I would perish
  in the embrace of his stronger existence.
  For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
  which we are barely able to endure and are awed
  because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
  Each single angel is terrifying.
  • First Elegy (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)

• Yes, the springtime was in need of you. Often a star
  waited for you to espy it and sense its light.
  A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,
  or as you walked below an open window,
  a violin gave itself to your hearing.
  All this was trust. But could you manage it?
  Were you not always distraught by expectation,
  as if all this were announcing the arrival
  of a beloved?

Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)

• A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence!
  Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
  And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
  a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.
  • Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Attributed

• Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.

• If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

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

External links

• The Rainer Maria Rilke Archive

de:Rainer Maria Rilke es:Rainer María Rilke fr:Rainer Maria Rilke it:Rainer Maria Rilke nl:Rainer Maria Rilke pl:Rainer Maria Rilke pt:Rainer Maria Rilke sk:Rainer Maria Rilke