Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

Image
Painting is something that takes place among the colors.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.).
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
And when suddenly the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry, uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ – she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
If my devils are to leave me, I'm afraid my angels will take flight as well.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Sometime we will have to stop overevaluating the word. We shall learn to realize that it is only one of the many bridges that connect the island of our soul with the great continent of common life. . . the broadest, perhaps, but in no way the most refined.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
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
Image
But because truly being here is so much because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
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
Image
Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.
Rainer Maria Rilke