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Adversity
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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.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Art
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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.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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City Life, Cities
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Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Color
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Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Creativity
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If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not a poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke
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Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Emotions
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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.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Flowers
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Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke
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Life
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The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Love
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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.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Men & Women
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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.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Opportunity
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We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Pleasure
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Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Poetry
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Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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From THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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From THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Portraits
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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.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Power
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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..
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Questions
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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.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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Relationships
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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
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Books by and about Rainer Maria Rilke