Quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

And in fact the artists experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss. And if instead of heat one could say sex;- sex in the great, pure sense of the word, free of any sin attached to it by the Church, - then his art would be very great and infinitely important. His poetic power is great and as strong as a primal instinct; it has its own relentless rhythms in itself and explodes from him like a volcano.

Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

Who shows a child, just as they are? Who sets itin its constellation, and gives the measureof distance into its hand? Who makes a child’s deathout of grey bread, that hardens, - or leaves itinside its round mouth like the coreof a shining apple? Killers areeasy to grasp. But this: death,the whole of death, before life,to hold it so softly, and not live in anger,cannot be expressed.

To retreat into oneself and meet nobody for hours on end—that is what one must be able to attain. To be alone, as one was alone as a child, when the grown-ups walked about involved in things which seemed great and important, because big people looked so busy and because one could comprehend nothing of their doings. And when one day one realises that their affairs are paltry, their professions benumbed and no longer connected with life, why not still like a child look upon them as something strange from without the depth of ones own world, regarding them from the immunity of ones own loneliness, which is itself work, position and profession? Why desire to exchange a childs wise incomprehension for self-defence and disdain? Incomprehension is loneliness, but self-defence and disdain are participation in that from which one is trying to separate oneself by these means.

And 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, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.

Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are.

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable.

Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight, something more than itself?

Isnt it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the string, collecting itselfto be more than itself as it shoots?

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor futurelessens . . . . Superabundant existencewells in my heart.

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Angels often do now know whether they walk among the dead or living.

Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.

Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, 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. Dont 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.

Wishes are memories coming from our future!