Goodreads helps you follow your favorite authors. Be the first to learn about new releases!
Start by following Rilke Maria Rainer.
Showing 1-14 of 14
“And if I have anything else to say to you it is this: do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different, he could never have found the words that he did.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“God created men in his own image, but he surpassed himself in creating women”
―
―
“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.”
―
―
“A mí no me da miedo
contemplar a los muertos. Pues si vienen
están en su derecho de quedarse
en nuestra mirada como las demás cosas.”
―
contemplar a los muertos. Pues si vienen
están en su derecho de quedarse
en nuestra mirada como las demás cosas.”
―
“Often I gazed at you in wonder. I stood at the window begun yesterday,
stood and marvelled at you. Yet the new city
was denied me and the unpersuaded landscape
darkened, as though I were nothing. Nor did things close by
venture to be understood. The street thrust upwards
at the lamp post: I could see it was an alien thing.
Over there a room, sympathetic, clear in the lamplight –
I was already a part; this they sensed, closed the shutters.
Remained there. Then a child cried. I knew the mothers
in the houses around, of what they are capable – and I knew
at once the inconsolable argument behind all weeping.
Or a voice sang out and reached a little beyond
expectation, or down below an old man
who coughed full of reproach, as if his body
were in the right and the gentler world in error. Then the hour struck,
but I counted too late, it fell past me.
Like a boy, a stranger, at last deemed worthy to join in
yet drops the ball and knows none of the games
in which the others indulge with such ease,
stands there, looks away – to where?: I stood and suddenly
became aware, you approached me, played with me, I understood,
grown-up night, and I gazed at you enraptured. Where the towers
raged and, with fate averted, a city loomed over me
and before me were ranged unknowable mountains
and in the narrowing circle of hungering strangeness
welled the random flickering of my feelings – :
there it was, higher one,
no shame for you, that you know me. Your breath
passed over me, across widening solemn expanses
your smile entered into me.”
―
stood and marvelled at you. Yet the new city
was denied me and the unpersuaded landscape
darkened, as though I were nothing. Nor did things close by
venture to be understood. The street thrust upwards
at the lamp post: I could see it was an alien thing.
Over there a room, sympathetic, clear in the lamplight –
I was already a part; this they sensed, closed the shutters.
Remained there. Then a child cried. I knew the mothers
in the houses around, of what they are capable – and I knew
at once the inconsolable argument behind all weeping.
Or a voice sang out and reached a little beyond
expectation, or down below an old man
who coughed full of reproach, as if his body
were in the right and the gentler world in error. Then the hour struck,
but I counted too late, it fell past me.
Like a boy, a stranger, at last deemed worthy to join in
yet drops the ball and knows none of the games
in which the others indulge with such ease,
stands there, looks away – to where?: I stood and suddenly
became aware, you approached me, played with me, I understood,
grown-up night, and I gazed at you enraptured. Where the towers
raged and, with fate averted, a city loomed over me
and before me were ranged unknowable mountains
and in the narrowing circle of hungering strangeness
welled the random flickering of my feelings – :
there it was, higher one,
no shame for you, that you know me. Your breath
passed over me, across widening solemn expanses
your smile entered into me.”
―
“Du musst dein Ändern leben.”
―
―
“...for at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unnutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.”
―
―
“o amor que consiste em duas solidões que se protegem, se delimitam e se cumprimentam mutuamente”
―
―
“Um novo ano vem chegando... A meia-noite passou, e a tempestade continua uivando como uma matilha de lobos feridos de morte. E a chuva cai com força sobre nós como um feixe de lanças chispantes. Mas nós estamos aqui quietos e pacientes e fitamos as trevas com olhos febris.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language.”
―
―
“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.”
―
―
“un simple mortal que sufría como todo el mundo, levantando su voz por encima del estruendo como si nos salvara a todos de la destrucción".”
―
―
“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it, blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches, for the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
―
―
