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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
Winning
Greater
Fighting
Successively
Makes
Decisively
Things
Defeated
Fight
Small

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I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me.
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Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name.
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All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.
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She followed slowly, taking a long time, As though there were some obstacles in the way And yet: as though, once it was overcome, She would be beyond all walking, and would fly.
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All things want to float.
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Love the questions, themselves.
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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.
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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.
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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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Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer
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I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
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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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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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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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Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.
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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.
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If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.
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We are the bees of the invisible. We madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.
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Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
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