Rainer Maria Rilke
Greatest lyric poet of the 20th century
Most quoted
"If you are a writer, you must be a writer. If you are a poet, you must be a poet. If you are a human being, you must be a human being. If you are a dog, you must be a dog. If you are a cat, you must be a cat. If you are a mouse, you must be a mouse. If you are a flea, you must be a flea. If you are a bacterium, you must be a bacterium. If you are a virus, you must be a virus. If you are a quark, you must be a quark. If you are a string, you must be a string. If you are a black hole, you must be a black hole. If you are a universe, you must be a universe. If you are nothing, you must be nothing. If you are everything, you must be everything."
— from Letters to a Young Poet
"And you, you who are so young, you must be patient with everything that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— from Letters to a Young Poet
"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. 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 is, 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."
— from Letters to a Young Poet, 1903
All quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke (255)
What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.
Everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish.
The more personal, the more universal.
The earth is like a child that knows poems.
Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.
The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.
It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.
The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.
What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.
Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
The scream is still there.
You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone, and then no one outside learns of you.
We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.
Contemporaries of Rainer Maria Rilke
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926).