Saturday, March 10, 2012

Rilke

Let life happen to you. Believe
me: life is in the right, always.
-Rainer Marie Rilke

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. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry Of Rainer Maria Rilke

Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

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, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final
-Rainer Maria Rilke

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