Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke—better known as Rainer Maria Rilke—was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described Rilke's work as inherently "mystical". His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry, and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief,...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth4 December 1875
CountryGermany
Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.
Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.
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.
You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.
Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids.
It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone.
Girls, there are poets who learn from you to say, what you, in your aloneness, are; and they learn through you to live distantness, as the evenings through the great stars become accustomed to eternity.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.
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.
There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.
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.
Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!
Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.
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.