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Rainer Maria Rilke
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„Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.“
„Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in unproductive moments. In productive ones try to make use of it as one more means of seizing life.“
„First a childhood, limitless and withoutrenunciation or goals. O unselfconscious joy.Then suddenly terror, barriers, schools, drudgery,and collapse into temptation and loss.Defiance. The one bent becomes the bender,and thrusts upon others that which it suffered.Loved, feared, rescuer, fighter, winnerand conqueror, blow by blow.And then alone in cold, light, open space,yet still deep within the mature erected form,a gasping for the clear air of the first one, the old one…Then God leaps out from behind his hiding place.“
„Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.“
„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.“
„This difficult living, heavy and as if all tied up,moving through that which has been left undone,is like the not-quite-finished walk of the swan.And dying, this slipping away fromthe ground upon which we stand every day,is his anxious letting himself fall—:into the waters, which receive him gladlyand which, as if happily already gone by,draw back under him, wave after wave;while the swan, infinitely calm and self-assured,opener and more magnificentand more serene, allows himself to be drawn on.“
„The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.“
„Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.“
„Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.“
„Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognise them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.“
„He was a poet and hated the approximate.“
„Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.“
„Extinguish my sight, and I can still see you;plug up my ears, and I can still hear;even without feet I can walk toward you,and without mouth I can still implore.Break off my arms, and I will hold youwith my heart as if it were a hand;strangle my heart, and my brain will still throb;and should you set fire to my brain,I still can carry you with my blood.“
„If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.“
„His tired gaze – from passing endless bars -has turned into a vacant stare which nothing holds.To him there seem to be a thousand bars,and out beyond these bars exists no world. His supple gait, the smoothness of strong stridesthat gently turn in ever smaller circlesperform a dance of strength, centered deep withina will, stunned, but untamed, indomitable. But sometimes the curtains of his eyelids part,the pupils of his eyes dilate as imagesof past encounters enter while through his limbsa tension strains in silenceonly to cease to be, to die within his heart.“
„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.“
„If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.“
„It must be immense, this silence, in which sounds and movements have room, and if one thinks that along with all this the presence of the distant sea also resounds, perhaps as the innermost note in this prehistoric harmony, then one can only wish that you are trustingly and patiently letting the magnificent solitude work upon you, this solitude which can no longer be erased from your life; which, in everything that is in store for you to experience and to do, will act as an anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, rather as the blood of our ancestors incessantly moves in us and combines with our own to form the unique, unrepeatable being that we are at every turning of our life.“
„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.“
„I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.“
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