Quote

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.

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
Memories
Tells
Seems
Breath
Sexed
Home
Breaths
Truer
Firsts
Strive
Strangely
First
Distance
Nearer
Kind
Memory
Striving
Infinite
Attached
Second
Tenderness

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Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.
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There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.
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Describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty-describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory.
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Fame — the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name.
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Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
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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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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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Painting is something that takes place among the colors.
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I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.
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The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.
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Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.
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Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know every bit your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are.
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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.
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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.
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I am so glad you are here. It helps me realize how beautiful my world is.
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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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I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way.
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What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.
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No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others
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The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.
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