“I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don’t know what happens there.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Often when I imagine you your wholeness cascades into many shapes. You run like a herd of luminous deer and I am dark, I am forest.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours I

“A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.” ”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

“I consider this to be the highest task of the union of two people: that each should keep watch on the solitude of the other.”

—Rilke, in a letter to Paula Modersohn-Baker

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to 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.”

—

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

(from)

“Our heart survives between hammers, just as the tongue between the teeth is still able to praise.”

—Rilke, Duino Elegy 9 (trans. A. Poulin)

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

—Rainer Maria Rilke

“How is it possible to live when … the elements of this life are utterly incomprehensible to us? If we are continually inadequate in love, uncertain in decision and impotent in the face of death, how is it possible to exist?”

—Rilke

“In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Sonnets to Orpheus” (translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by 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

“For the sake of a line of poetry one must see many cities, people, and things, one must know animals, must feel how the birds fly, and know the gestures with which small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to paths in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one long saw coming; to childhood days that are still not understood, to parents one had to hurt when they brought one a joy and one did not understand it (it was a joy to someone else); to childhood illnesses that set in so strangely with so many profound and heavy transformations, to days in quiet, muted rooms and to mornings by the sea, the sea altogether, to nights travelling that rushed up and away and flew with all the stars; and if one can think of all that, it is still not enough.”

—Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. by Burton Pike
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