Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

• 

  The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Images
• 

  If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Intelligence

  Tags in Surrendered, Earth

• Who shows a child as he really is? Who sets him in his constellation and puts the measuring-rod of distance in his hand?

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Uncategorized

• No, we don’t accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Uncategorized

• And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Why don’t you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity… the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in God

• I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Friendship

  Tags in People, Solitude, Highest, Protect, Hold
• 

  I live my life in widening circles. That reach out across the world.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in God, Inspirational, Life

  Tags in Reach, Widening

• There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Always, Right, Most, Difficult, Class

• Not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Poet, Creator, Seems, Enough, Poor, Poverty, Blame

• I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Dream

  Tags in Poetry

• Every angel is terrifying.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all people, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Attitude, Beauty, Love

  Tags in Myth, Self-Care, Courage
• 

  Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Topics in Beauty

  Tags in Happen, Feeling

Rainer Maria Rilke (46)

Birth:	4th December, 1875
Death:	29th December, 1926
Nationality:	Austrian
Profession:	Novelist, Poet

About

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke better known as Rainer Maria Rilke was a Bohemian-Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an
age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

Related Authors

• Steven L. Peck
• Greg Bear
• Wally Lamb
• James Crumley
• Brenda Peterson
• Margaret Way
• D. H. Lawrence
• Rohinton Mistry
• Ford Madox Ford
• Ivy Compton Burnett

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 21st November

Births

• 1929 - Marilyn French
• 1844 - Ada Cambridge
• 1870 - Alexander Berkman
• 1958 - Rickson Gracie
• 1971 - Michael Strahan

Deaths

• 1922 - Ricardo Flores Magon
• 1996 - Mohammad Abdus Salam
• 1958 - Mel Ott
• 2000 - Sir Cyril Astley Clarke
• 1969 - Norman Lindsay