Source: Rainer Maria Rilke
23 records meet the criteria.- ...artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight.
[Art] - ...for sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?
[Awareness] - ...our heart survives between hammers, just as the tongue between teeth is still able to praise.
[Heart] - A billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.
[Eternity] - All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling.
[Companionship] - Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are 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.
[Patience] - Being means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
[Patience] - Children, one earthly thing truly experienced, even once, is enough for a lifetime.
[Experience] - Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find those words.
[Advice] - For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
[Beauty] - For he had loved again and again in his solitude, each time squandering his whole nature and in unspeakable fear for the freedom of the other person.
[Love] - For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof; the work for which all other work is but preparation
[Love] - 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.
[Love] - I live my life in widening circles
That reach across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
But I give myself to it.
[Life] - I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
[Dreams] - Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.
[Love] - Our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise, 'invisibly', in us.
[Experience] - The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.
I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.
[Perspective] - Weren't you always distracted by expectation as if every event announced a beloved?
[Expectations] - 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] - When I saw others straining toward God, I did not understand it, for though I may have had him less than they did, there was no one blocking the way between him and me, and I could reach his heart easily. It is up to him, after all, to have us, our part consists of almost solely in letting him grasp us.
[God] - You nights of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,
Inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
To see if they have an end. Though they are really
Seasons of us, our winter..
[Fear] - You, darkness, of whom I am born--
I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes all the rest.
But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations--just as they are.
It lets me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.
I believe in the night.
[Darkness]