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

Rainer Maria Rilke

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Rainer Maria Rilke
Age: 51 †
Born: 1875
Born: December 4
Died: 1926
Died: December 29
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
Writer
Praha
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
René Maria Cäsar Rilke
Rainer Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Li-erh-kʻo
Rainer Maria Rielke
René Rilke
Rainer Mariyah Rilḳeh
Rainŏ Maria Rilkʻe
Reiner Marie Rilke
Rene Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Rene Rilke
Life
Questions
Along
Perhaps
Answers
Knowing
Live
Without
Even
Distant

More quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

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As the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.
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Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.
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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?
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Sometime we will have to stop overevaluating the word. We shall learn to realize that it is only one of the many bridges that connect the island of our soul with the great continent of common life. . . the broadest, perhaps, but in no way the most refined.
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I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
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Spring has again returned. The Earth is like a child that knows many poems. Many, O so many. For the hardship of such long learning she receives the prize. Strict was her teacher. The white in the old man's beard pleases us. Now, what to call green, to call blue, we dare to ask: She knows, She knows!
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But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, would feel the emotion that almost baffles us when a happy thing falls.
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If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor, then everything will become easier for you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.
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Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath?
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She followed slowly, taking a long time, As though there were some obstacles in the way And yet: as though, once it was overcome, She would be beyond all walking, and would fly.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.
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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.
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There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.
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But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.
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If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So like children, we begin again... to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. (from the poem How Sure Gravity's Law)
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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.
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The artist's task consists of making one thing of many, and a world from the smallest part of a thing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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We are the bees of the invisible. We madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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The necessary thing is after all but this solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.
Rainer Maria Rilke