Rainer Maria Rilke

“You, yesterday’s boy, to whom confusion came: Listen, lest you forget who you are. It was not pleasure you fell into. It…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“It's ridiculous. Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, who have got to be twenty-eight years old and about whom…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Never forget that solitude is my lot ... I implore those who love me to love my solitude." ( Letter to Mimi Romanelli , May 11, 1910)”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

What keeps you from... living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?

— Rainer Maria Rilke

All professions are... filled with demands.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“So many are alive who don’t seem to care. Casual, easy, they move in the world as though untouched. But you take…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“I do not wish to say that one should love death; but one should love life so magnanimously, so without calculating and…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude,…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“For it is not only lethargy alone which causes human relationships to repeat themselves in the same old way with such unspeakable…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.

— 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

“And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Our heart always transcends us.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Now for some heartwork.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“If somewhere deep within me arises some essence of having been a child, one I never experienced, perhaps the purest childness of…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Confess to yourself in the deepest hour of the night whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.…

— Rainer Maria Rilke