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He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence.

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
Life
Possession
Takes
Existence
Inexpressible
Power
Exalt
Doe
Fullness
Even
Consent
Never
Definite
Time
Determination

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Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.
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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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Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.
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...a carefree letting go of oneself, not a caution, but a wise blindness.
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Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense's crossroad.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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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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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Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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.
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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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... be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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?
Rainer Maria Rilke
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The future must enter you long before it happens.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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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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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For one human being to love another that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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It is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite necessity of that life and would have been absorbed by it without effort.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.
Rainer Maria Rilke