"The hero is strangely akin to those who die young."
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Rainer Maria Rilke quotes (page 17 of 25)
487 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is possible I am pushing through solid rock, like the vein of ore encased, alone. I am such a long way in I can see no way through and no space. Everything is close to my face and everything close to my face is stone. I don't have much knowledge yet in grief, so this darkness makes me feel small. You, be the Master; Make yourself fierce; break in. And then your great transforming will happen to me And my great grief cry will happen to you."
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"I have patience for centuries in me and will live as though my time were very big."
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"The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain."
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"I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers."
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"It is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite necessity of that life and would have been absorbed by it without effort."
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"To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one."
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"My loving friend, you see, my life was never given a foundation, no one was able to imagine what it would want to become. In Venice there stands the so-called Ca del Duca, a princely foundation, on which later the most wretched tenement came to be built. With me it's the opposite: the beautiful arched elevations of my spirit rest on the most tentative beginning; a wooden scaffolding, a few boards....Is that why I feel inhibited in raising the nave, the tower to which the weight of the great bells is to be hoisted (by angels, who else could do it)?"
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"Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings."
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"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."
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"If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself, Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth."
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"Look: the trees exist; the houses we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we pass by it all, like a rush of air. And everything conspires to keep quiet about us, half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope."
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"There exists a creature which is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes you scarcely notice it and forget it again immediately. But as soon as it invisibly gets somehow into your ears, it develops there, it hatches, as it were, and cases have been known where it was penetrated even into the brain and has thriven devastatingly in that organ, like those pneumococci in dogs that gain entrance through the nose.This creature is one's neighbor."
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"In the night, I wish to speak with the angel to find out if she recognizes my eyes, if she will ask me: do you see Eden? And I’ll reply: Eden burns."
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"Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know every bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are."
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"Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name."
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"Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner -- what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming."
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"most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth."
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"Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them."
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"Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law."
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