In the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise, let alone help another, a great deal must come about, a great deal must come right, a whole constellation of things must concur for it to be possible at all.
Catalog
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926)—better known as Rainer Maria Rilke (German: [ˈʁaɪnɐ maˈʁiːa ˈʁɪlkə])—was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described Rilke's work as inherently "mystical". His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry, and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety. These deeply existential themes tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist writers. Rilke was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, travelled extensively throughout Europe, including Russia, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and in his later years settled in Switzerland—settings that were key to the genesis and inspiration for many of his poems. While Rilke is most known for his contributions to German literature, over 400 poems were originally written in French and dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland. Among English-language readers, his best-known works include the poetry collections Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), and a collection of ten letters that was published after his death under the title Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter). In the later 20th century, his work found new audiences through its use by New Age theologians and self-help authors, and through frequent quoting in television programs, books and motion pictures. In the United States, Rilke remains among the more popular, best-selling poets. 2Biography 3Early life (1875–1896) He was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague, capital of Bohemia (then part of Austria-Hungary, now part of the Czech Republic
We must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to…
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked room and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
We must accept our existence in as wide a sense as can be; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible within it.
We are solitary.
...what we call fate originates in ourselves in humankind, and does not work on us from the outside.
...there are many indications that it is the future that enters into us like this, in order to be transformed within us, long before it actually occurs. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and static moment when our…
...perhaps we should then bear our sadness with greater assurance than our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters into us, something unknown to us...
To love is also good, for love is hard. Love between one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, do not…
People have tended (with the help of conventions) to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light, and on the lightest side of the light, but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult.
...He perhaps requires of you precisely this existential anxiety in order to begin. Precisely these days of transition are perhaps the period when everything in you is working on him, just as before, as a child you worked on him with bated breath. Be patient and even-tempered and remember that the…
Don't you see how everything that happens is always a beginning again, and could be it not be His beginning, given that beginnings are in themselves always so beautiful?
What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.
There is only one solitude, and that is vast and not easy to bear and almost everyone has moments when they would happily exchange it for some form of company...
You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best as I can...to be patient towards all that is unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they…
If you hold close to nature, to what is simple in it, to the small things people hardly see and which all of a sudden can become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is slight, and quite unassumingly, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor - then everything…
These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It…
...progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated.