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
It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.
Since I've learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.
Why don't you conceive of God as an ally who is coming, who has been approaching since time began, the one who will someday arrive, the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Why not project his birth into the future, and live your life as an excruciating and lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy?
You must change your life.
We are the bees of the invisible. We madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.
What keeps you from... living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?
Stand up during supper and walk outdoors, and keep on walking.
The moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
Life is heavier than the weight of all things.
Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.
the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.
Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.