Rainer Maria Rilke Quotations

Wishes are recollections coming from the future.

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.

Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.

Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Think... of the world you carry within you.

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.

All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.