Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke 

Leonid Pasternak

c. 1921-24

"

The future stands still, Mr Kappus, but we move in infinite space.

How could it not be difficult for us?

"

Rainer Maria Rilke | Letters to a Young Poet | pg. 86

"Works of art of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch them and be fair to them."

Rainer Maria Rilke | Letters to a Young Poet | pg. 23

Rainer Maria Rilke | Letters to a Young Poet (1984, first edition) | trans. and with a foreward by Stephen Mitchell

"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."

Rainer Maria Rilke 

(Source: werckmeister, via semperaugustus)

Ah, we count the years and introduce divisions here and there and stop and begin anew and waver between these options. But everything that we encounter is so very much of one piece, and so intimately related to everything else, and has given birth to itself, grows, and is then raised so much to come into its own, that we basically just need to be there, if only unassumingly, if only authentically, the way the earth is there in its affirmation of the seasons, light and dark and wholly in space, longing to be supported by nothing but that web influences and forces where the stars feel secure.

- Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Ulrich Baer; emphasis added) 

"Poet or painter, musician or architect, all solitary individuals at bottom who turn to nature because they prefer the eternal to the transient, the profound rhythms of eternal laws to that which finds justification in passing."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Not to award more meaning to what happens than what it assumes on its own; not to consider suffering from the outside, not to measure it and call it great, “great suffering”…For you cannot be sure whether your heart did not also grow with it and whether this immense fatigue is not actually the heart growing and expanding. To have patience, patience, and not to judge when suffering, never to judge as long as one is bound up in suffering. One does not have a measure for it; one makes comparisons and exaggerates. 

-Rainer Maria Rilke

"How dangerous and merciless is life up to to the final moment, a well-tamed creature, and yet inside of it how many insatiable forces that threaten it like wild beasts."

Rainer Maria Rilke

What we experience as spring, god views as a fleeting tiny smile that passes over the earth. The earth seems to be remembering something, and in the summertime she tells everyone about it until she grows wiser during that great autumnal silence with which she confides in those who are alone. Even when taken together, all the springs that you and I have experienced are not enough to fill even one of god’s seconds. The spring that god is supposed to notice must not remain in the trees and meadows but somehow has to assume its force within people, for then it takes place, as it were, not in time but in eternity and in god’s presence. 

- Rainer Maria Rilke

"Are there circumstances of the heart that include the greatest horrors for the sake of being complete, because the world is not world until Everything occurs within it?"

Rainer Maria Rilke

In life one cannot awaken often enough the sense of a beginning within oneself. There is so little external change needed for that since we actually transform the world from within our hearts. If the heart longs for nothing but to be new and unlimited, the world is instantly the same as on the day of its creation and infinite. 

Rainer Maria Rilke

It does not happen frequently that something very great is condensed into a thing that can just be held entirely in one hand, in one’s own, impotent hand. Just as when one finds a tiny bird that is thirsty. You take if away from the edge of death, and the little heartbeats increase gradually in the warm, trembling hand like the wave at the edge of a giant ocean for which you are the shore. And you suddenly realize, while holding this little recovering animal, that life is recovering from death. And you hold it up. Generations of birds, and all of the forests over which they pass, and all of the skies into which they will rise. And is any of this easy? No: you are very strong to carry the heaviest burden in such an hour.

- Rainer Maria Rilke