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)
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
Sex is difficult, yes. But they are tasks that are entrusted to us, and if we only have that in mind, it suddenly becomes bearable and even sweet.
We need, in love, to discover ourselves in another.
Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing.
The great questions are in their nature so vast and so urgent that the act of describing them is the first step to understanding them.
May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.
I am the rest between two notes, which are themselves only vague transitions.
One had to take some action against fear; even if one did not wholly succeed, one would still have done something.
Art too is just a way of surviving.
The Earth has no sorrow that earth cannot heal.
To be here is so much.
Let life happen to you. Believe in things as they are.
The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.
God is the sum of all possible states of being.
In the end, what is most important is not the words themselves, but the inner silence that they evoke.
The only way out is through.
We are born, so to speak, with a longing for the infinite.
Every angel is terrifying.
Praise the world to the angel, not the unsayable things.
Contemporaries of Rainer Maria Rilke
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926).