The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

You are not the poet I love most. You are poetry itself.

Poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.com

Poetry Writing Poetry My Philosophy Understanding Inspiration Writing

For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.com

Winter Descriptions of Hell

I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose

— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.com

Childhood Teenage Wildlife Time & Identity

And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless,…

— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.com

Where The Words Come From Composing Memory

Everyone knows the impulse to imagine that we were meant to be the citizens of some other place. It is from this sensation that the angels come into existence, creating in this world their ambience of pure loss.

— Stephen Mitchell, amazon.com

Idealism Angels

For this is wrong, if anything is wrong: not to enlarge the freedom of a love with all the inner freedom one can summon. 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, amazon.com

Love Letting Go of Love Tides of Love

True singing is a different breath, about nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.com

Music Perfect Music Singing

This impulse to imagine that we were meant to be the citizens of some other place. It is from this sensation that the angels come into existence, creating in this world their ambience of pure loss.

— Robert Hass, amazon.com

Theology

The road from intensity to greatness passes through sacrifice.

— Rudolf Kassner, amazon.com

Great Works

Build the great arch of unimagined bridges.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.com

Great Enthusiasm Great Works Soothing Language Ambition 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature

Your blood flowed darkly.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.com

Blood

Anxious, we keep longing for a foothold — we, at times too young for what is old and too old for what has never been.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.com

Home Is Where Young and Old

For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.com

Average Everydayness Banality Enthusiasm Fighting For The Ideal Great Work

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