The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

God, give us each our own death,

the dying that proceeds

from each of our lives.

Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.

Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.

Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.

Let thine shadows upon the sundials fall,

and unleash the winds upon the open fields.

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away ... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet

Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.

Out of infinite longings rise

finite deeds like weak fountains,

falling back just in time and trembling.

And yet, what otherwise remains silent,

our happy energies—show themselves

in these dancing tears.

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet

Spring has come again. The earth is like a child who knows poems by heart.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, The Poetry of Rilke

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet

No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.