Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Opportunity
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation … Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person—it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen … to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Difficulty, Love
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above you head. But in you is the presence that will be, when the stars are dead.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Writing
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses – would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Memory
There is only one journey: going inside yourself.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Life and Living
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Flowers
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Relationships
Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Confidence, Assurance
Fame is the sum of misapprehensions that accrue around a name.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Franz Kafka Austrian Novelist
Franz Grillparzer Austrian Dramatist
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach Austrian Novelist
Ludwig Wittgenstein Austrian-born British Philosopher
Viktor Frankl Austrian Psychiatrist
Wilhelm Stekel Austrian Physician
Alfred Adler Austrian Psychiatrist
Ludwig von Mises Austrian Economist
Klemens Wenzel, Prince von Metternich Austrian Political leader
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe German Poet