Quote

Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and 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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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
Word
Endure
Existences
Life
Space
Aren
Endures
People
Art
Whose
Transitory
Usually
Tangible
Happens
Works
Entered
Ever
Happen
Beside
Believe
Small
Mysterious
Things
Existence
Experiences
Unsayable
Would

More quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

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Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.
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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I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Think... of the world you carry within you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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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Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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They, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.
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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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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking, you overpowered their noise with harmony, and from pure destruction arose your transfigured song.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.
Rainer Maria Rilke