110+ Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes On Questions, Mystic And Introspective

Rainer Maria Rilke was a German-language poet and novelist. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His poetry is noted for its intensity and spirituality, with many of his works exploring themes of love, faith, and existentialism. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke on love, life, questions.

Top 10 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

1. The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.
2. The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
3. Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.
4. Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final
5. Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
6. Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
7. This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.
8. 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.
9. If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.
10. and I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song

Rainer Maria Rilke Image Quotes

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The only journey is the one within. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke Short Quotes

• The only journey is the one within.
• Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.
• Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.
• What batters you becomes your strength.
• Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!
• I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
• We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.
• Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.
• The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
• Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes About Love

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an 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

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. — Rainer Maria Rilke

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. — Rainer Maria Rilke

You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. — Rainer Maria Rilke

a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude — Rainer Maria Rilke

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes About Life

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don't come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time. — Rainer Maria Rilke

you are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out it's own secret — Rainer Maria Rilke

Life - a sexually transmitted terminal condition. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Always trust yourself and your own feelings, as opposed to arguments and discussions. If it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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. — Rainer Maria Rilke

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Just keep going - no feeling is final. — 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

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes About Questions

I beg you, 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. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Be patient with all that is unsolved in your life. Learn to love the questions themselves, until some distant day, without your knowing, you will have lived into the answers. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves...At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Love the questions, themselves. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Learn to love the questions themselves. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Live the questions now. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes About World

Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them. They change the world. — Rainer Maria Rilke

No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed. — Rainer Maria Rilke

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted. — Rainer Maria Rilke

And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? — Rainer Maria Rilke

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough — Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in widening circle That reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower. I have been circling for thousands of years, And I still don't know: am I a falcon, A storm, or a great song? [I, 2] — Rainer Maria Rilke

Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The artist's task consists of making one thing of many, and a world from the smallest part of a thing. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes About Live

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Be of good courage all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost...What is required of us is that we live the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves despite all opposition. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I have patience for centuries in me and will live as though my time were very big. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Thus we live, forever taking leave. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens . . . . Superabundant existence wells in my heart. — 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. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes About Heart

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Our heart always transcends us. — Rainer Maria Rilke

That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling... it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. — Rainer Maria Rilke

A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world's. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write? — Rainer Maria Rilke

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke Famous Quotes And Sayings

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things. — 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 sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everthing in me that is bewildered and confused. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It seems to me that the only way one can be helpful is to extend one's hand to someone else involuntarily, and without ever knowing how useful this will be. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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 existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life — Rainer Maria Rilke

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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. — Rainer Maria Rilke

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Painting is something that takes place among the colors. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Fame — the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. — Rainer Maria Rilke

You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive. — Rainer Maria Rilke

As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Fig tree, how long it's been full meaning for me, the way you almost entirely omit to flower and into the seasonably-resolute fruit uncelebratedly thrust your purest secret. Like the tube of a fountain, your bent bough drives the sap downwards and up: and it leaps from its sleep, scarce waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Wishes are recollections coming from the future. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way. — Rainer Maria Rilke

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Yield not thy neck To fortune's yoke, but let thy dauntless mind Still ride in triumph over all mischance. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. — Rainer Maria Rilke

All things want to float. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too. — Rainer Maria Rilke

More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing placed under profound laws, and when he goes out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then all status drops from him as from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of sheer life. — Rainer Maria Rilke

A billion stars go spinning through the night, / glittering above your head, / But in you is the presence that will be / when all the stars are dead. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve. — Rainer Maria Rilke

To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer — Rainer Maria Rilke

[A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed. — 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 future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space. — Rainer Maria Rilke

What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love. — Rainer Maria Rilke

There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread — 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 know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song. — Rainer Maria Rilke

May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Solitude is nothing that one can choose or retrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. — Rainer Maria Rilke

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Understand, I'll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I'll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows with only this one dream: You come too. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Truly to sing, that is a different breath. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Be ahead of all farewells as if they were behind you, like the winter that is just departing. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Lord, it is time. The summer was very big. Lay thy shadow on the sundials, and on the meadows let the winds go loose. Command the last fruits that they shall be full; give them another two more southerly days, press them on to fulfillment and drive the last sweetiness into the heavenly wine. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days? — Rainer Maria Rilke

At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant path, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it. — Rainer Maria Rilke

We wasters of sorrows! How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our interior year. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. — Rainer Maria Rilke

...a carefree letting go of oneself, not a caution, but a wise blindness. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows' wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven... in the ponds broken off from the sky. . . — Rainer Maria Rilke

Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things — Rainer Maria Rilke

Life Lessons by Rainer Maria Rilke

1. Rainer Maria Rilke encourages us to embrace life’s uncertainties and to be open to the beauty of the unknown. He teaches us to be courageous and to trust in our own inner strength, so that we can find our own path and make our own choices.
2. Rilke also encourages us to be mindful and to take time to appreciate the little things in life. He reminds us to be present and to savor every moment, because life is fleeting and unpredictable.
3. Finally, Rilke reminds us to be gentle with ourselves and to practice self-love and self-care. He encourages us to be kind to ourselves and to be mindful of our own needs and feelings.