What do you think?
Rate this book
Letters on Life
Gleaned from Rainer Maria Rilke’s voluminous, never-before-translated correspondence, this volume offers the best writings and personal philosophy of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets. The result is a profound vision of how the human drive to create and understand can guide us in every facet of life. Arranged by theme–from everyday existence with others to the exhilarations of love and the experience of loss, from dealing with adversity to the nature of inspiration–here are Rilke’s thoughts on how to infuse everyday life with beauty, wonder, and meaning.
Intimate, stylistically masterful, brilliantly translated and assembled, and brimming with the passion of Rilke, Letters on Life is a font of wisdom and a perfect book for all occasions.
Intimate, stylistically masterful, brilliantly translated and assembled, and brimming with the passion of Rilke, Letters on Life is a font of wisdom and a perfect book for all occasions.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
66 people are currently reading
888 people want to read
About the author
Rainer Maria Rilke
1,798 books6,933 followersA mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include
The Book of Hours
(1905) and
The Duino Elegies
(1923).
People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .
He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .
He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
May 12, 2020
Letters are becoming, or rather, have become a lost art. The workings of a mind can be gleaned from his/her correspondence, even more cogently than from an autobiography, because they present uninhibited delineations, profound ruminations and instinctual responses. Rilke's letters do much more than allowing us to limn his personality or biography - they provide us with invaluable wisdom, philosophical insights and solace. Rilke was a prodigious letter writer, and composed approximately seven thousand letters. Even in translation, the letters retain a distinct lyrical quality. Every letter of Rilke is a work of art.
Ulrich Baer observes: "The power of Rilke's writings results from his capacity to interlock the description of everyday objects, minute feelings, small gestures, and overlooked things - that which makes up the world for each of us - with transcendent themes...and minutely explains in his letters, that the key to the secrets of our existence might be found right in front of our eyes." Indeed, the letters draw attention towards the vicissitudes of existence, oblivious changes and the recesses of our mind. Rilke reflects on existence, friendship, work, adversity, childhood, pedagogy, nature, solitude, illness and convalescence, death, language, aesthetics, religion, morality and love - his letters can thus serve as a true 'guide to life'.
Life has been created quite truthfully in order to surprise us (where it does not terrify us altogether).
You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but according to its depth.
Life goes on, and it goes past a lot of people in a distance, and around those who wait it makes a detour.
Empathy is humility, imitation is vanity.
To be a part, that is fulfillment for us: to be integrated with our solitude into a state that can be shared.
Alas, for whom the will wavers, for him wavers the world.
We have no memory whatsoever of that which was easy and light.
The experience of something that has been thwarted is surely matched on the other side by something that has been unexpectedly fulfilled.
What we experience as spring, god views as a fleeting, tiny smile that passes over the earth. The earth seems to be remembering something, and in the summertime she tells everyone about it until she grows wiser during that great autumnal silence with which she confides in those who are alone. Even when taken together, all the springs that you and I have experienced are not enough to fill even one of god's seconds. The spring that god is supposed to notice must not remain in the trees and meadows but somehow has to assume its force within people, for then it takes place, as it were, not in time but in eternity and in god's presence.
The loneliest people above all contribute most to commonality...The individual who could hear the entire melody would be at once the loneliest and the most common, for he would hear what no one else hears and yet only because he could grasp in its perfect completeness that which others strain to hear obscurely and only in parts.
...death is rooted so deeply in the essence of love that it nowhere contradicts love.
To be someone, as an artist, means: to be able to speak one's self.
To be loved means to be ablaze. To love is: to cast light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to last.
Ulrich Baer observes: "The power of Rilke's writings results from his capacity to interlock the description of everyday objects, minute feelings, small gestures, and overlooked things - that which makes up the world for each of us - with transcendent themes...and minutely explains in his letters, that the key to the secrets of our existence might be found right in front of our eyes." Indeed, the letters draw attention towards the vicissitudes of existence, oblivious changes and the recesses of our mind. Rilke reflects on existence, friendship, work, adversity, childhood, pedagogy, nature, solitude, illness and convalescence, death, language, aesthetics, religion, morality and love - his letters can thus serve as a true 'guide to life'.
Life has been created quite truthfully in order to surprise us (where it does not terrify us altogether).
You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but according to its depth.
Life goes on, and it goes past a lot of people in a distance, and around those who wait it makes a detour.
Empathy is humility, imitation is vanity.
To be a part, that is fulfillment for us: to be integrated with our solitude into a state that can be shared.
Alas, for whom the will wavers, for him wavers the world.
We have no memory whatsoever of that which was easy and light.
The experience of something that has been thwarted is surely matched on the other side by something that has been unexpectedly fulfilled.
What we experience as spring, god views as a fleeting, tiny smile that passes over the earth. The earth seems to be remembering something, and in the summertime she tells everyone about it until she grows wiser during that great autumnal silence with which she confides in those who are alone. Even when taken together, all the springs that you and I have experienced are not enough to fill even one of god's seconds. The spring that god is supposed to notice must not remain in the trees and meadows but somehow has to assume its force within people, for then it takes place, as it were, not in time but in eternity and in god's presence.
The loneliest people above all contribute most to commonality...The individual who could hear the entire melody would be at once the loneliest and the most common, for he would hear what no one else hears and yet only because he could grasp in its perfect completeness that which others strain to hear obscurely and only in parts.
...death is rooted so deeply in the essence of love that it nowhere contradicts love.
To be someone, as an artist, means: to be able to speak one's self.
To be loved means to be ablaze. To love is: to cast light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to last.
January 1, 2021
"Whether you are surrounded by the singing of a lamp or the sounds of a storm, by the breathing of the evening or the sighing of the sea, there is a vast melody of a thousand voices that never leaves you and only occasionally leaves room for your solo. To know when you have to join in, that is the secret of your solitude, just as it is the art of true human interaction: to let yourself take leave of the lofty words to join in with the one shared melody."
October 6, 2023
I am glad I own this book, I read it with a stack of post-it flags beside me which I used to mark passages that touched me, or made me think. My book now looks like a porcupine!
Rainer Maria Rilke was a German poet who died in 1926. He was also a prolific letter writer and this book is composed of excerpts from his letters and journals. I was intrigued enough to look up some of his poetry and pleasantly surprised to find I enjoyed the ones I read - I generally find poetry unreachable.
A (very) few of my favourite passages:
Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.
The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.
All of our insights occur after the fact.
I realize with a sense of dread that one grows numb with regard to even the most wonderful things when they become part of one's daily interactions and surroundings.
In what soil of misery we poet-moles are digging around, never sure where we will push up and who might devour us at that very spot where we stick our dusty nose out of the soil.
And so many more....
2nd read
It has been 7 years since my first read and I still had all the post it flags in place. Interestingly, while I still enjoyed the passages I had flagged, most didn’t hit me with the same urgency as 7 years ago. Now I found new passages to flag, re-read, savour and ruminate upon.
Once the background melody has been discovered one is no longer baffled in one’s speech and obscure in one’s decisions. There is a carefree security in the simple conviction that one is part of a melody, which means that one legitimately occupies a specific space and has a specific duty toward a vast work where the least counts as much as the greatest. Not to be extraneous is the first condition for an individual to consciously and quietly come into his own.
This is what it means to be young: this thorough faith in the most beautiful surprises, this joy in daily discovery.
Art means to be oblivious to the fact that the world already exists and to create one.
Don’t wait for powerful things and good days to turn you into something but preempt them and be it yourself already.
Joy is inexpressibly more than happiness. Happiness befalls people, happiness is fate, while people cause joy to bloom inside themselves. Joy is plainly a good season for the heart; joy is the ultimate achievement of which human beings are capable.
Rainer Maria Rilke was a German poet who died in 1926. He was also a prolific letter writer and this book is composed of excerpts from his letters and journals. I was intrigued enough to look up some of his poetry and pleasantly surprised to find I enjoyed the ones I read - I generally find poetry unreachable.
A (very) few of my favourite passages:
Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.
The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.
All of our insights occur after the fact.
I realize with a sense of dread that one grows numb with regard to even the most wonderful things when they become part of one's daily interactions and surroundings.
In what soil of misery we poet-moles are digging around, never sure where we will push up and who might devour us at that very spot where we stick our dusty nose out of the soil.
And so many more....
2nd read
It has been 7 years since my first read and I still had all the post it flags in place. Interestingly, while I still enjoyed the passages I had flagged, most didn’t hit me with the same urgency as 7 years ago. Now I found new passages to flag, re-read, savour and ruminate upon.
Once the background melody has been discovered one is no longer baffled in one’s speech and obscure in one’s decisions. There is a carefree security in the simple conviction that one is part of a melody, which means that one legitimately occupies a specific space and has a specific duty toward a vast work where the least counts as much as the greatest. Not to be extraneous is the first condition for an individual to consciously and quietly come into his own.
This is what it means to be young: this thorough faith in the most beautiful surprises, this joy in daily discovery.
Art means to be oblivious to the fact that the world already exists and to create one.
Don’t wait for powerful things and good days to turn you into something but preempt them and be it yourself already.
Joy is inexpressibly more than happiness. Happiness befalls people, happiness is fate, while people cause joy to bloom inside themselves. Joy is plainly a good season for the heart; joy is the ultimate achievement of which human beings are capable.
January 26, 2012
incredible book! rilke is truly one of the greatest writers/poets; a singular voice whose words are just as relevant today as when he wrote them. this book is a great way to take in rilke's writing in small doses and savor the wisdom of each. i come back to it often. the audiobook version of this read by ethan hawke is also worth checking out.
August 30, 2025
In this selection of letters Rilke gives expression to some profound and inspiring observations about solitude, relationship, art, love, work, the rhythm of the individual and the whole. But you occasionally have to tweezer your way through a little bit of obscurity in both the roundabout sentence construction and the delineations of his vision to excavate Rilke's metaphysical yet earthy gems from their small print, and to let them resound more flowingly inside the mind.
— To look at something is such a wonderful thing of which we still know so little. When we look at something, we are turned completely toward the outside by this activity. But just when we are most turned toward the outside like that, things seem to take place within us that have longed for an unobserved moment, and while they unfold within us, whole and strangely anonymous, without us, their significance begins to take shape in the external object in the form of a strong, convincing, indeed their only possible name. And by means of this name we contentedly and respectfully recognize what is happening inside us without ourselves touching upon it. We understand it only quietly, entirely from a distance, under the sign of a thing that had just been alien and in the next instant is alienated from us again
— There is no possibility of catching up with anything we missed, given how the world is both outside and inside so very full of that which is always most immediate.
— Ultimately this is what constitutes the events and values in the world: that time and again one hears of someone who has said things that one had thought only obscurely and who has done things that one had expressed only at a fortuitous moment. Such things make you grow. This awareness of conduits and liens reaching from distant solitary figures to us and from us to god knows where and to whom, this I consider our best feeling: it leaves us alone and yet simultaneously patches us into a great communality where we take hold and have help and hope.
Some reviewers of this book regret that these selections miss the context of the original letters in their entirety. Mere quotes and soundbites would lack too much but personally I'm pretty happy we don't get the whole letter. We have a fair enough edit of them, from a few lines to 2-3 pages in some cases, which do not seem to take anything away from the essential message of the contemplations Rilke airs to his correspondents, which I think is what they are rather than advice.
Rilke seems to have been ahead of his time in many ways, not least in rejecting organised religion for a more aesthetically and humanistic secular science of pure observation and experience bridging a sacred or mystically grand sense of what life is along with its absolutely empirical and grounded one; an approach which aligns him much more to the philosophies of ancient Zen or the original teachings of Vedanta or the Buddha.
There are many beautiful sentiments here:
— To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.
— Transform? Yes, for it is our task to impress this provisional, transient earth upon ourselves so deeply, so agonizingly, and so passionately that its essence rises up again "invisibly" within us. We are the bees of the invisible. We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.
— What we all need most urgently now: to realize that transience is not separation—for we, transient as we are, have it in common with those who have passed from us, and they and we exist together in one being where separation is just as unthinkable. Could we otherwise understand such poems if they had been nothing but the utterance of someone who was going to be dead in the future? Don’t such poems continually address inside of us, in addition to what is found there now, also something unlimited and unrecognizable? I do not think that the spirit can make itself anywhere so small that it would concern only our temporal existence and our here and now: where it surges toward us there we are the dead and the living all at once.
I could never advocate a ‘creative’ translation, even a mild but faithful one, and definitely not of the kind that’s transformed the Stoics into muscular, sexually liberated, keto-dieting Alphas with impeccable judgement for every situation in modern life, but wondering if it was the translation or me I did learn there’s an abridged audiobook of this called A Poet's Guide to Life, read by Ethan Hawke, which might be a smoother way to absorb Rilke's insights.
— To look at something is such a wonderful thing of which we still know so little. When we look at something, we are turned completely toward the outside by this activity. But just when we are most turned toward the outside like that, things seem to take place within us that have longed for an unobserved moment, and while they unfold within us, whole and strangely anonymous, without us, their significance begins to take shape in the external object in the form of a strong, convincing, indeed their only possible name. And by means of this name we contentedly and respectfully recognize what is happening inside us without ourselves touching upon it. We understand it only quietly, entirely from a distance, under the sign of a thing that had just been alien and in the next instant is alienated from us again
— There is no possibility of catching up with anything we missed, given how the world is both outside and inside so very full of that which is always most immediate.
— Ultimately this is what constitutes the events and values in the world: that time and again one hears of someone who has said things that one had thought only obscurely and who has done things that one had expressed only at a fortuitous moment. Such things make you grow. This awareness of conduits and liens reaching from distant solitary figures to us and from us to god knows where and to whom, this I consider our best feeling: it leaves us alone and yet simultaneously patches us into a great communality where we take hold and have help and hope.
Some reviewers of this book regret that these selections miss the context of the original letters in their entirety. Mere quotes and soundbites would lack too much but personally I'm pretty happy we don't get the whole letter. We have a fair enough edit of them, from a few lines to 2-3 pages in some cases, which do not seem to take anything away from the essential message of the contemplations Rilke airs to his correspondents, which I think is what they are rather than advice.
Rilke seems to have been ahead of his time in many ways, not least in rejecting organised religion for a more aesthetically and humanistic secular science of pure observation and experience bridging a sacred or mystically grand sense of what life is along with its absolutely empirical and grounded one; an approach which aligns him much more to the philosophies of ancient Zen or the original teachings of Vedanta or the Buddha.
There are many beautiful sentiments here:
— To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.
— Transform? Yes, for it is our task to impress this provisional, transient earth upon ourselves so deeply, so agonizingly, and so passionately that its essence rises up again "invisibly" within us. We are the bees of the invisible. We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.
— What we all need most urgently now: to realize that transience is not separation—for we, transient as we are, have it in common with those who have passed from us, and they and we exist together in one being where separation is just as unthinkable. Could we otherwise understand such poems if they had been nothing but the utterance of someone who was going to be dead in the future? Don’t such poems continually address inside of us, in addition to what is found there now, also something unlimited and unrecognizable? I do not think that the spirit can make itself anywhere so small that it would concern only our temporal existence and our here and now: where it surges toward us there we are the dead and the living all at once.
I could never advocate a ‘creative’ translation, even a mild but faithful one, and definitely not of the kind that’s transformed the Stoics into muscular, sexually liberated, keto-dieting Alphas with impeccable judgement for every situation in modern life, but wondering if it was the translation or me I did learn there’s an abridged audiobook of this called A Poet's Guide to Life, read by Ethan Hawke, which might be a smoother way to absorb Rilke's insights.
October 11, 2014
Though I only gave this three stars it was not as if I did not enjoy it, I liked it. I wasn't wowed or left with any particularly strong reactions to it is all. This might be because this book really didn't introduce me to any thoughts or ideas I hadn't read or heard before somewhere else (though I have studied religion and philosophy extensively to the point that not much catches me by surprise anymore. not a brag -just explaining why a solid book didn't do much for me in the wow department). It could be because it was very rough in places, and though it might be that the translation was true to the original, it certainly didn't make it a joy to read. This book does contain many wonderful passages though and many sound ideas. I look forward to exploring his poetry.
April 14, 2011
Definitely a favorite! Here you have thematically arranged snippets of Rilke's letters to various people. He was such a prolific letter writer--makes me wonder when he actually spent time on his own art seeing as he wrote everyday about it! :)
Favorite.
Favorite.
February 23, 2018
A wonderful cross section of aphoristic wisdom covering some of the most vital and often most difficult of existential challenges. The notes on loneliness were particularly poignant and well observed.
May 25, 2008
A got-to-have source of Rilkean wisdom. Especially (but not only) for artists!
February 6, 2009
The section "Being with Others," esp. resonates. This whole book is like a buffet of awesomeness.
January 15, 2012
Rilke is like no other. I will probably never stop reading his words - over and over....
March 27, 2009
LOVELY, very wise, I've gained a lot of insight from reading this book, particularly enjoyed the chapter over work and art
September 28, 2010
Oh, Rilke.
November 1, 2024
Very frustrating. I'd been looking forward to...well, letters.
Instead the book is a collection of snippets, often only a few lines, taken from Rilke's correspondence without any context. I don't think there's a single complete letter in the entire book.
Rilke has some beautiful sentences, of course. But without the context and the build-up they turn into platitudes.
Instead the book is a collection of snippets, often only a few lines, taken from Rilke's correspondence without any context. I don't think there's a single complete letter in the entire book.
Rilke has some beautiful sentences, of course. But without the context and the build-up they turn into platitudes.
January 7, 2020
This was my second attempt with Rilke and his letters.
I find it more pontification than edification.
Enough.
I find it more pontification than edification.
Enough.
May 29, 2022
A reread for me of a formative book for me as a writer. Moments of the book are indispensable
October 13, 2014
Rainer Maria Rilke is one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century, and if anything his fame and influence have increased with time. He represented a change in thought - Rilke parted ways with the Romantic tradition in the form of Schiller and Keats. For Rilke, the search for beauty “dwells and is awake in each thing,” and the search for beauty opposed the purpose of art, which was to find integrity, honesty, and truth. This collection of previously untranslated correspondence shows his philosophy of life developing and elaborating over time, and provides keen insight into Rilke’s mind.
The high points of this collection read like extraordinary wisdom on everyday life. Some very quotable statements are as following:
“Wishes are memories coming from our future!” (10)
“We lead our lives so poorly because we arrive in the present always unprepared, incapable, and too distracted for everything.” (12)
“You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but according to its depth. One does not have to do what comes next if one feels a greater affinity with that which happens later, at a remove, even in a remote distance. One may dream while others are saviors if these dreams are more real to oneself than reality and more necessary than bread. In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.” (14)
“Fame is nothing but the sum of all the misunderstandings that cluster around a new name…Wherever a human achievement becomes truly great, it seeks to hide its face in the lap of general, nameless greatness.” (53)
“To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.” (69)
“Nothing makes it more difficult to help than the intention of doing so.” (179)
There is, however, a darker side as well, and it is just as revealing. Rilke was heartless about his decision to prioritize his writing and intellectual life over that of his wife and child. He wrote, “I have to find the strength to lift life in its entirety and including everything into calmness, into solitude, into the quiet of profound days of labor.” It is instructive to remember that, no matter how insightful and wise, or how beautiful is his writing, he himself made choices that I would consider incorrect, amoral, unloving, and unwise. On the subject of marriage, he wrote in guarded fashion that “No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be ‘happy’—once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy!” (36)
“Above all marriage is a new task and a new seriousness—a new challenge and a question regarding the strength and kindness of each participant and a new great danger for both.” (36) We have a connotation of Rilke that he, despite his search for truth, was at his heart a Romantic. This collection dispels that myth entirely. He was always suspicious of permanent human relationships. “It is contrary to nature to part with books with which one agrees, just as it is important in the same case not to hold on to people for too long.”(130) For Rilke, the search for truth was an independent quest in the life of the mind. Human relationships were a means to that end, but should persist only so long as they do not distract.
With this in mind, the context of Rilke the artist becomes clearer. “Art is directed against nature: it is the most passionate inversion of the world, the return path from infinity where all honest things now face us. There, on this path, they can now be seen in their entirety, their faces come closer and their movements become more distinct—but who are we to be allowed to proceed in this direction facing them all, to carry out this eternal reversal that deceives them by making them believe that we had already arrived somewhere, at some destination, and that now we can leisurely retrace our steps?” (52)
Rare is the book that challenges the reader to assess their own morality. Rilke’s grace with language, his opinionated style, and his clarity of thought all combine in this volume. It truly is a great collection of thoughts.
The high points of this collection read like extraordinary wisdom on everyday life. Some very quotable statements are as following:
“Wishes are memories coming from our future!” (10)
“We lead our lives so poorly because we arrive in the present always unprepared, incapable, and too distracted for everything.” (12)
“You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but according to its depth. One does not have to do what comes next if one feels a greater affinity with that which happens later, at a remove, even in a remote distance. One may dream while others are saviors if these dreams are more real to oneself than reality and more necessary than bread. In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.” (14)
“Fame is nothing but the sum of all the misunderstandings that cluster around a new name…Wherever a human achievement becomes truly great, it seeks to hide its face in the lap of general, nameless greatness.” (53)
“To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.” (69)
“Nothing makes it more difficult to help than the intention of doing so.” (179)
There is, however, a darker side as well, and it is just as revealing. Rilke was heartless about his decision to prioritize his writing and intellectual life over that of his wife and child. He wrote, “I have to find the strength to lift life in its entirety and including everything into calmness, into solitude, into the quiet of profound days of labor.” It is instructive to remember that, no matter how insightful and wise, or how beautiful is his writing, he himself made choices that I would consider incorrect, amoral, unloving, and unwise. On the subject of marriage, he wrote in guarded fashion that “No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be ‘happy’—once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy!” (36)
“Above all marriage is a new task and a new seriousness—a new challenge and a question regarding the strength and kindness of each participant and a new great danger for both.” (36) We have a connotation of Rilke that he, despite his search for truth, was at his heart a Romantic. This collection dispels that myth entirely. He was always suspicious of permanent human relationships. “It is contrary to nature to part with books with which one agrees, just as it is important in the same case not to hold on to people for too long.”(130) For Rilke, the search for truth was an independent quest in the life of the mind. Human relationships were a means to that end, but should persist only so long as they do not distract.
With this in mind, the context of Rilke the artist becomes clearer. “Art is directed against nature: it is the most passionate inversion of the world, the return path from infinity where all honest things now face us. There, on this path, they can now be seen in their entirety, their faces come closer and their movements become more distinct—but who are we to be allowed to proceed in this direction facing them all, to carry out this eternal reversal that deceives them by making them believe that we had already arrived somewhere, at some destination, and that now we can leisurely retrace our steps?” (52)
Rare is the book that challenges the reader to assess their own morality. Rilke’s grace with language, his opinionated style, and his clarity of thought all combine in this volume. It truly is a great collection of thoughts.
January 20, 2014
The mystical, trippy, sometimes self-contradictory, often baffling, yet always eloquent writings of Rilke, who preached a life of self-exploration and adventure, even as he survived on the donations and support of artistic patrons. Great stuff in here, though some of his views on gender are very dated, and some passages are inscrutable or too long.
June 12, 2014
Beautiful writing. Some passages are perhaps a little long winded but it is understandable why they would not be broken into smaller units. This is a collection I'll be leaving within reach as many of Rilke's insights are best saved for pondering. His wisdom is to be challenged at times, accepted at others, but never devoured without sufficient contemplation.
March 5, 2013
"Rilke believe that we may gain access to something beyond ourselves within and through ourselves rather than by reaching a higher power that supersedes and thus ultimately minimizes our own potential..."
July 8, 2017
"There is no more wretched prison than the fear of hurting someone who loves you," (Rilke, 2006, p. 192). I found the beauty, wonder, and meaningful journey on his letters compilation that can move oneself to questioning more of every facet of life.
June 4, 2008
Not as rich as Letters to a Young Poet, but there are some gems in here too.
February 11, 2016
Beautiful collection of Rilke's writings on love, faith, morality, nature, and other themes. This text is nourishing!
August 9, 2016
Really enjoyed a lot of this book, particularly the chapter on death. Definitely a book to go back to as the years go by.
January 24, 2021
I read this over about 6 months which I thought was still too quick. Rilke’s ideas always inspire me. His thoughtfulness in considering the possibilities in life remind me to slow down and re-examine my own understanding of truth and the human condition. I would have loved to have studied Rilke more closely in school, but I think Baer did an excellent job of selecting these fragments together. My 4/5 star rating is mostly my own preference, having wished for more context around each passage. All around, a great primer on Rilke’s philosophies and his passion for life itself!
January 1, 2021
Lots of beautiful prose here. Heidegger seems to take a lot of language and sentiment from Rilke, at least from what I have read of him. I see echoes of Nietzsche too, but not to the extent that I thought I would. A good read with some very elegant words regardless.
February 19, 2021
“True advances of my life could not be brought about by force but occur silently “ ; “when fate bestows boundless gifts on us, most people dont accept straightforwardly, but with a secondary purpose in mind”. What do you know about things that are light and easy?
June 29, 2020
Thoughtful, wise and beautiful. . .
November 17, 2020
flip through this every couple months . . . always something there . . . deep internal soul stuff . . . this guy knows what he is doing!
September 16, 2012
Sounds cliche, but it is a real gem. Dug it out in a 3-storey bookstore in Taipei. So bipolar can one be with his views on life and how he actually lives it. The thoughts of Rilke are well categorized into different genres and topics. Inspiring and touching in every word. Can't put it down and will always find its way to my handbag!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews