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It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.

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
Begin
Beginning
Violence
Simply
Anything
Able
Skip
Tremendous

More quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

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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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It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)
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If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.
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Painting is something that takes place among the colors.
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Draw near to Nature. Then try like some first human being to say what you see and experience and love and lose.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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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Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.
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Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us mostly they are passed on unopened.
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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!
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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The future must enter you long before it happens.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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
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Go into yourself. Dig into yourself for a deep answer
Rainer Maria Rilke
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There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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
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Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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
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Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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.
Rainer Maria Rilke