Quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke
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 great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.
Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.
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.
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.
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.
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.
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
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.
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me..
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 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.
More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.
All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
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.
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.
