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

More quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

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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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One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
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Now for some heartwork.
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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.
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The future must enter you long before it happens.
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It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
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I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
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Be ahead of all farewells as if they were behind you, like the winter that is just departing.
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Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.
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only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
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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.
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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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
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Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Understand, I'll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I'll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows with only this one dream: You come too.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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. . . denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben andern. (... for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.)
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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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.
Rainer Maria Rilke