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
Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.
You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born.
Our heart always transcends us.
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.
Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true.
Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.
Think... of the world you carry within you.
Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!
Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.