Justin > Justin's Quotes

“The only journey is the one within.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
― Rainer Maria 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.
Every angel is terrible.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“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 to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You are not too old
and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out
its own secret.”
― Rilke

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours: A New Translation with Commentary (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

“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”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people -

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably 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.”
― Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The most powerful kind of code constructs other code that has been bundled with just the right amount of curated data; such a bundle is not just a “function pointer” but a closure (in a functional language) or an object (in an object-oriented language).”
― Chris Hanson, Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner

“We have all spent too much time trying to deform an old piece of code so that it could be used in a way that we didn't realize would be needed when we wrote it.”
― Chris Hanson, Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner