"May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children."
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Quote collection
Rainer Maria Rilke quotes (page 12 of 25)
487 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"May you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people."
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"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning."
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"Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent."
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"I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language."
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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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"Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered."
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"We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.... 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."
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"Sometime we will have to stop overevaluating the word. We shall learn to realize that it is only one of the many bridges that connect the island of our soul with the great continent of common life. . . the broadest, perhaps, but in no way the most refined."
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"But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere."
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"Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent."
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"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves...At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer."
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"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."
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"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"
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"Everything in the world of things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in."
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"If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys."
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"You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house - , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon, - you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening."
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". . . denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben andern. (... for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.)"
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"Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of."
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"Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood."
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