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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.

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
Work
Open
Never
Public
Concerning
Since
Directed
Read
Letter
Doe
Author
Anything
Critics
Feel
Letters
Feels
Criticism

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Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.
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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.
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To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.
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I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.
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Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath?
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When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.
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I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.
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Everything is blooming most recklessly if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
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Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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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You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing That is more than your own. Let it brush your cheeks As it divides and rejoins behind you. The trees you planted in childhood have grown Too heavy. You cannot bring them along. Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
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Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.
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He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work.
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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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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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Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.
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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.
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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.
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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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Life and death: they are one, at core entwined. Who understands himself from his own strain presses himself into a drop of wine and throws himself into the purest flame.
Rainer Maria Rilke