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
I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.
the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.
Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.
Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?
I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.
Look, lovers: almost separately they come towards us through the flowery grass and slowly; parting's so far from thought of, they indulge the extravagance of walking unembraced.
To be here is immense.
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.
Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids.
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.
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.
But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, would feel the emotion that almost baffles us when a happy thing falls.
Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.