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Letters to a Young Poet quotes

Rainer Maria Rilke

English (33) Français (31)

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“if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not...” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“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...” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“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.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the...” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all...” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us...” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“It is necessary — and toward this point our development will move, little by little — that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“believe in a love that is being stored up for you like and 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.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious...” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. ” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“if there is no communal feeling between you and other people, try to be near to things — they will not abandon you.” 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” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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solitude sadness experience love art difficulty life change words patience sickness move relationship answers trust courage strength future pain loneliness

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Rainer Maria Rilke quotes