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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
Skip
Tremendous
Begin
Beginning
Violence
Simply
Anything
Able

More quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

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Do you remember how life yearned out of childhood toward the great thing? I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one.
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For our part, when we feel, we evaporate ah, we breathe ourselves out and away with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him.
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Learn to love the questions themselves.
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Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.
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And when suddenly the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry, uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ – she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?
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Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation. You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold, comes at long last over everyone.
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If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself, Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth.
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And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.
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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
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You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense.
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For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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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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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As the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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