"There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course."
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Quote collection
Rainer Maria Rilke quotes (page 16 of 25)
487 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I believe in all that has never yet been spoken."
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"Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters."
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"Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense's crossroad."
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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."
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"we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible."
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"I am too alone in the world and not alone enough to make every moment holy."
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"I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future."
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"Thus we live, forever taking leave."
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"If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance."
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"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."
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"Resolve to be always beginning-to be a beginner!"
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"What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude."
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"A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it."
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"It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity."
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"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of."
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"Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name."
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"Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism."
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"Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help."
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"I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough"
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