Quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way--and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

If somewhere deep within me arises some essenceof having been a child, one I never experienced,perhaps the purest childness of my childhood,I don’t want to know it. Without even looking,I want to form an angel out of itand hurl him into the foremost rankof screaming angels, to remind God.

Art is childhood.

What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?

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

Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over...Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush.

But 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.

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.

Never forget that solitude is my lot ... I implore those who love me to love my soli

it is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. 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.

Whenever one speaks of lonely people one takes too much for granted. One thinks people all know what theyre dealing with. No, they do not. Theyve never seen a lonely person, theyve simply hated him without knowing him. Theyve been his neighbours whove used him up, they were the voices in the next room who tempted him. They roused things up against him, getting them to make a din and drown him out. Children ganged up against him when he was a tender child, and at every stage of his growing up he grew hostile to grown-ups . They tracked him to his hiding-place like an animal of chase and throughout his long youth there was no closed season. And when he didnt allow himself to be worn out so that he got away they yelled about what came forth from him and called it ugly and were suspicious of it. And as he didnt stop they grew more obvious and gobbled up his food and breathed up his air and spat into his poverty so that he himself became disgusted at it. They brought him into disrepute as if he were a contagion and threw stones at him to speed his departure. And they were right to follow their age-old instinct: because he really was their enemy. But then when he didnt look up they had second thoughts. They suspected that in all of this they had acted as he had willed them to act; they had strengthened him in his solitude and had helped him separate himself from them for ever.

There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving… But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring.

It is true that many young people who wrongly, that is, simply with abandon and unsolitarily, feel the oppressiveness of a failure and want to make the situation in which they have landed viable and fruitful in their own personal way—; for their nature tells them that, less even than all else that is important, can questions of love be solved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case demand a new, special, only personal answer—: but how should they, who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.

At first the solitudecharmed me like a prelude,but so much music wounded me.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

O dieses ist das Tier, das es nicht giebt.Sie wußtens nicht und habens jeden Falls– sein Wandeln, seine Haltung, seinen Hals,bis in des stillen Blickes Licht – geliebt.Zwar war es nicht. Doch weil sie’s liebten, wardein reines Tier. Sie ließen immer Raum.Und in dem Raume, klar und ausgespart,erhob es leicht sein Haupt und brauchte kaumzu seinÈ questo l’animale favoloso, che non esiste. Non veduto mai, ne amaron le movenze, il collo, il passo: fino la luce dello sguardo calmo.Pure “non era”. Ma perchè lo amarono,divenne. Intatto. Gli lasciavan sempre più spazio. E in quello spazio chiaro, etereo:serbato a lui – levò, leggiero, il capo.And here we have the creature that is not.But they did not allow this , and as it happens- his gait and bearing, his arched neck,even the light in his eyes - they loved it all.Yet truly he was not. But because they loved himthe beast was seen. And always they made room.And in that space, empty and unbounded,he raised an elegant head, yet hardly foughtfor his existence. Oh ! Cest elle, la bête qui nexiste pas.Eux, ils nen savaient rien, et de toutes façons- son allure et son port, son col et même la lumièrecalme de son regard - ils lont aimée.Elle, cest vrai, nexistait point. Mais parce quils laimaientbête pure, elle fut. Toujours ils lui laissaient lespace.Et dans ce clair espace épargné, doucement,Elle leva la tête, ayant à peine besoin dêtre.

Then suddenly you’re left all alonewith your body that can’t love youand your will that can’t save you.