I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Think…of the world you carry within you…be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it…
Rainer Maria Rilke
To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating.
Rilke
Works of art are of an infinite loneliness…Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.
Rilke
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this one
but I give myself to it.
Rilke
For what sometimes
Overwhelms us always
Clings to it, too—
A kind of memory that tells us
That what we’re now
Striving for was once
Nearer and truer and
Attached to us
With infinite tenderness.
Here all is distance,
There it was breath.
Rilke
If only we too could find
Some defined narrow,
Purely human place,
Our own small strip of fertile soil
Between stream and stone.
For even now our heart
Transcends us,
Just as with those others.
And no longer
Can we gaze after it
Into pictures that soothe, or
Into godlike bodies
Where it finds
A grander restraint.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.
Rilke
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
Rilke
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.
Rilke
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.
Rilke
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.
Rilke
Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final
Rilke
