Duino Elegies Quotes

“Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
our season in our inner year--, not only a season
in time--, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil
and home.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“We only pass everything by
like a transposition of air.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“But if the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us,
perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the
bare
branches of the hazel-trees, or
would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in
springtime.--

And we, who have always thought
of happiness as rising, would feel
the emotion that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing falls.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Like the curved pipe of a fountain, your arching boughs
drive the sap
downward and up again: and almost without awakening
it bursts out of sleep, into its sweetest achievement.
Like the god stepping into the swan.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling
was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Not wooing, no longer shall wooing, voice that has outgrown
it
be the nature of your cry; but instead, you would cry out as
purely as a bird
when the quickly ascending season lifts him up, nearly
forgetting
that he is a suffering creature and not just a single heart
being flung into brightness, into the intimate skies.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up
these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still
survives,
a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt
before--
just as it is, it passes into the invisible world.
Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance
to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues:
greater.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus