Poetry Quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

Art too is just a way of living.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“I want to unfold. I don’t want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair. [Songs of Longing]”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“we want it visible to show when even the most visible joy will reveal itself only when we have transformed it within.…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Girls, there are poets who learn from you to say, what you, in your aloneness, are; and they learn through you to…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Seulement la terre qui obéit, sait bien qu'elle tourne en rond, tandis que nous vers l'infini nous précipitons. Translation: But the obedient…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnesses, gather…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“The Letters to a young poet illustrate perfectly the kindliness, the complexity, and at the same time the impersonality and remoteness of…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ah, only plunged toward you does my face cease being on display, grows into you and twines on darkly, endlessly, into your…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Spring has again returned. The Earth is like a child that knows many poems. Many, O so many. For the hardship of…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough,…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath- no: as one presses it against a wound out of which the whole of life,…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“We of the here-and-now are not for a moment satisfied in the world of time, nor are we bound in it; we…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“He began to write a new type of short lyric, which he sometimes called a “Kunst-Ding”: a poem in which the obtrusive…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“How surely gravity's law, strong as an ocean current, takes hold of the smallest thing and pulls it toward the heart of…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“One should wait, and gather meaning and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, at the very end, one…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do you remember…(doesn’t that appear in each of my letters?), do you remember that you spoke of how eagerly you experienced that…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Lovers were not, Marina, are not permitted to know destruction so deeply. Must be as if they were new. Only their grave…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Some day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer signify merely an opposite of the masculine, but something…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“These Things, whose essential life want to express, first ask you, “Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking, you overpowered their…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action. And in the…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Songs of longing! And they will resound in my letters, just as they always have, sometimes loudly and sometimes secretly so that…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books…

— Rainer Maria Rilke