Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes
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The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
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All professions are... filled with demands.
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You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.
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Learn to love the questions themselves.
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We wasters of sorrows! How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our interior year.
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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
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One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
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True singing is a different breath, about nothing.
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Life is heavier than the weight of all things.
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And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
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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.
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Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer.
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Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom.
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That is longing: To dwell in the flux of things, To have no home in the present. And these are wishes: gentle dialogues Of the poor hours with eternity.
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Success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up of thousands of things, we never fully know what.
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There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.
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This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess of that precious nourishing love from which flowers and children have their strength and which could help all human beings if they would take it without doubting.
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I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
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Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.
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Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.
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That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.
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God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.
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A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.
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Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.
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At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.
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How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights! Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters, on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.
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Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.
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For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
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And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true.
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To be here is immense.
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