Rainer Maria Rilke

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."

"only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being."

"I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future."

"It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive."

"You darkness, that I come from,I love you more than all the firesthat fence in the world,for the fire makesa circle of light for everyone,and then no one outside learns of you. But the darkness pulls in everything:shapes and fires, animals and myself,how easily it gathers them! -powers and people -and it is possible a great energyis moving near me. I have faith in nights."

"How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you."

"I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enoughto make every moment holy. I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enoughjust to lie before you like a thing,shrewd and secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,as it goes toward action;and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,when something is coming near,I want to be with those who know secret thingsor else alone. I want to be a mirror for your whole body,and I never want to be blind, or to be too oldto hold up your heavy and swaying picture. I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,because where I am folded, there I am a lie.and I want my grasp of things to betrue before you. I want to describe myselflike a painting that I looked atclosely for a long time,like a saying that I finally understood,like the pitcher I use every day,like the face of my mother,like a shipthat carried methrough the wildest storm of all."

"To love is good, too: love being difficult. 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... Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things."

"If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.- Mitchell translation"

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

"I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world."

"So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?"

"If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable."

"If we surrenderedto earth's intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees."

"Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."

"In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?"

"“If we surrenderedto earth’s intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselvesin knots of our own makingand struggle, lonely and confused. So like children, we begin again...to fall,patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do thatbefore he can fly.”"

"“A billion stars go spinning through the night,glittering above your head,But in you is the presence that will bewhen all the stars are dead.”"

"“It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.”"

"“Every angel is terrifying.”"