Quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.
The only journey is the one within.
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.
One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.
There are quantities of human faces, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
Truly to sing, that is a different breath.
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
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.
Live the questions.
Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.
Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain.
At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.
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 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 find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.
There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force it's sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without the fear that after them may come no Summer. It does come. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves ... 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 it, 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.
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.
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.
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 ...
Everything terrible is something that needs our love.
Do continue to believe that with your feeling 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.
