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
Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights! Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters, on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.
Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.
He does not always remain bent over the pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer
More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.
Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.
Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.
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.
We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.
When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.