“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I am the dream you are dreaming. When you want to awaken, I am that wanting: I grow strong in the beauty you behold And with the silence of stars I enfold your cities made by time.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The book of a monastic life, I, 19

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

—Rainer Maria Rilke

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

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Wendung” (Turning-Point)
(as translated by Stephen Mitchell)

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

—Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, and like books that are now 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.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

“Yet no matter how deeply I go down into myself my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence. ”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Hours

“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. ”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

“The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. ”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Loading more posts...