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Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

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
Endure
Beginning
Beauty
Disdains
Stills
Awed
Still
Serenely
Able
Annihilate
Nothing
Disdain
Terror

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Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.
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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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The only journey is the one within.
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If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.
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Und dasTotsein ist mu« hsam und voller Nachholn, dass man allm a« hlich ein wenig Ewigkeit spu« rt. And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.
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Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
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There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along.
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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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Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.
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Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.
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We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important.
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Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
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All things want to float.
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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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Learn to love the questions themselves.
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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.
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Spring has again returned. The Earth is like a child that knows many poems. Many, O so many. For the hardship of such long learning she receives the prize. Strict was her teacher. The white in the old man's beard pleases us. Now, what to call green, to call blue, we dare to ask: She knows, She knows!
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Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer.
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Everything is blooming most recklessly if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
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