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
God...sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves ... Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point it, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no indifferent place.
That is the principle thing - not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it into all things
Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good.
All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.
Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.
Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.
Resolve to be always beginning-to be a beginner!
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.