“You are not the poet I love most. You are poetry itself.”— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.comTagged: Descriptions of Muses
“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.comTagged: 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.comTagged: 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.comTagged: 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.comTagged: 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.comTagged: 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.comTagged: 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.comTagged: 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.comTagged: Theology
“The road from intensity to greatness passes through sacrifice.”— Rudolf Kassner, amazon.comTagged: Great Works
“Build the great arch of unimagined bridges.”— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.comTagged: Great Enthusiasm, Great Works, Soothing Language, Ambition, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature
“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.comTagged: 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.comTagged: Average Everydayness, Banality, Enthusiasm, Fighting For The Ideal, Great Work