Quotes from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“A billion stars go spinning through the night,
glittering above your head,
But in you is the presence that will be
when all the stars are dead.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep under so many
lids.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is time only to work slowly
There is no time not to love”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Oh hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more than the past appeared
and what streamed out before us was not the future.
We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sake
of those with nothing left but their grownupness.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows' wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“And you suddenly know: It was here!
You pull yourself together, and there
stands an irrevocable year
of anguish and vision and prayer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk
only on feelings. That faces upward
and in its mirror
receives heavenly roads, which travel
along themselves.
That has learned to walk upon water
when it scoops,
that walks upon wells,
transfiguring every path.
That steps into other hands,
changes those that are like it
into a landscape:
wanders and arrives within them,
fills them with arrival.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is nothing but a breath, the void.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Why must a man be always taking on Things not his own, as if he were a servant whose marketing-bag grows heavier and heavier from stall to stall and, loaded down, he follows and doesn’t dare ask: Master, why this banquet?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable, it is alternately stone in you and star.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For 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.     And”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Along The Sun-Drenched Roadside


Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great
hollow half-treetrunk, which for generations
has been a trough, renewing in itself
an inch or two of rain, I satisfy
my thirst: taking the water's pristine coolness
into my whole body through my wrists.
Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;
but this unhurried gesture of restraint
fills my whole consciousness with shining water.

Thus, if you came, I could be satisfied
to let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,
lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast.


Translated by Stephen Mitchell”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate. From images that are full, the spirit plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled; there are no lakes till eternity. Here, falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion into the guessed-at, and onward.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

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“Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.”
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