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Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.

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
Dove
Cared
Tenderness
Utterly
Ones
Cannot
Never
Doves
Endangered

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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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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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If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So like children, we begin again... to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. (from the poem How Sure Gravity's Law)
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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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Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.
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Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'hierarchies? and even if one of thempressed me against his heart: I would be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothingbut the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,and we are so awed because it serenely disdainsto annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
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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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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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Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids.
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Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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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...a carefree letting go of oneself, not a caution, but a wise blindness.
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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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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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.
Rainer Maria Rilke