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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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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
Small
Winning
Greater
Fighting
Makes
Successively
Things
Decisively
Defeated
Fight

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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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Do continue to believe that with your feeling and with your work you are taking part in the greatest the more strongly you cultivate in yourself this belief, the more will reality and world go forth from it.
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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.
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Now for some heartwork.
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Fame — the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name.
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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.
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Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom.
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The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping is nothing without the continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousandfold assent from Things and animals... beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions.
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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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God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.
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Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final
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You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.
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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.)
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Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.
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Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
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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.
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One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
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Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out.
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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)
Rainer Maria Rilke