Quote

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

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
Winning
Greater
Fighting
Makes
Successively
Things
Decisively
Defeated
Fight
Small

More quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

Image
Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation. You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold, comes at long last over everyone.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
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
Image
Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows' wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches for the Creator, there is no poverty.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
The necessary thing is after all but this solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense's crossroad.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Image
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
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
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.
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
Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation.
Rainer Maria Rilke