Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances... Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough."
69 Quotes
"It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances... Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"If we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge...the individual...can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery---which the world is filled with..."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"It is true that many young people who wrongly, that is, simply with abandon and unsolitarily, feel the oppressiveness of a failure and want to make the situation in which they have landed viable and fruitful in their own personal way—; for their nature tells them that, less even than all else that is important, can questions of love be solved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case demand a new, special, only personal answer—: but how should they, who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?"
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving… But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"it is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to. And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?"
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"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, Letters to a Young Poet
"For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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