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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
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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
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Things
Decisively
Defeated
Fight
More quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke
We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate.
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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.
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Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law.
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I am so glad you are here. It helps me realize how beautiful my world is.
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I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.
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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.
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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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Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
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Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and great each other.
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... be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.
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Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.
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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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They, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.
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Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
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Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.
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Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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.
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When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.
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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.
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Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.
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