Nicole > Nicole's Quotes

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.”
― Lewis Carroll , Alice in Wonderland

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

[The Minotaur]”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

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

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Truth suffers from too much analysis.

-Ancient Fremen Saying”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“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.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.

Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.”
― 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

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
― Rainer Marie 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

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

“Think... of the world you carry within you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley

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

“That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.”
― Rainer Maria 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

“Every angel is terrifying.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“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

“I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everything terrible is something that needs our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke