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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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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
Endure
Angel
Disdains
Beginning
Serenely
Terrible
Amazes
Beauty
Disdain
Able
Barely
Nothing
Terror
Every
Destroy

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.
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You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. ... But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
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Shattered people are best represented by bits and pieces.
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Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
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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.
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All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.
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My art is representational by choice....if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home. Speak and attest. More than ever the things we can live with are falling away, and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image. Will beneath crusts which readily crack whenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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
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Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?
Rainer Maria Rilke
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We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can everything, even the unheard - of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable.
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Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.
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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
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Be patient with all that is uncertain in your heart...do not search for answers, which will not be given: you will not be able to live them, and its importat to live everything.
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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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