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It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.

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
Love
Infinity
Sooner
Beloved
Later
Reach
Nature
Part
Every
Definitive

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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.
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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.
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Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens . . . . Superabundant existence wells in my heart.
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a kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.
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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.
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There are no classes in life for beginners right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
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We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.
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Why don't you conceive of God as an ally who is coming, who has been approaching since time began, the one who will someday arrive, the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Why not project his birth into the future, and live your life as an excruciating and lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy?
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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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Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.).
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. . . denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben andern. (... for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.)
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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.
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Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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.
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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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You must think that something is happening upon you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand it will not let you fall.
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