"The most visible joy can only reveal itself to us when we've transformed it, within."
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Rainer Maria Rilke quotes (page 19 of 25)
487 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away."
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"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 be true. I want to describe myself like a painting that I looked at closely 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 ship that carried me through the wildest storm of all."
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"I would like to sing someone to sleep, to sit beside someone and be there. I would like to rock you and sing softly and go with you to and from sleep. I would like to be the one in the house who knew: The night was cold. And I would like to listen in and listen out into you, into the world, into the woods. The clocks shout to one another striking, and one sees to the bottom of time. And down below one last, strange man walks by and rouses a strange dog. And after that comes silence. I have laid my eyes upon you wide; and they hold you gently and let you go when something stirs in the dark."
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"If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself."
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"Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from."
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"I don’t want to stand before you like a thing, shrewd, secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action. And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to unfold. I don’t want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie."
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"No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you."
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"You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest."
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"Girls, there are poets who learn from you to say, what you, in your aloneness, are; and they learn through you to live distantness, as the evenings through the great stars become accustomed to eternity."
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"Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable."
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"So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in."
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"All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom."
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"Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and great each other."
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"I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie."
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"Truly it is glorious, our being here."
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"That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter."
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"Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism."
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"Love the questions, themselves."
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"Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you."
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