Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

We die only once, and for such a long time.

Death is like taking an intermission when you can't come back. I like living and being around.

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

All lovely things will have an ending, All lovely things will fade and die; And youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

The human race is intoxicated with narrow victories, for life is a string of them like pearls that hit the floor when the rope breaks, and roll away in perfection and anarchy.

This is part of the involuntary bargain we make with the world just by being alive. We get to experiences the splendor of nature, the beauty of art, the balm of love and the sheer joy of existence, always with the knowledge that illness, injury, natural disaster, or pure evil can end it in an instant for ourselves or someone we love.

I can't die but once.

The top of a pinnacle now, firewood soon

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; a shining gloss that fadeth suddenly; a flower that dies when it begins to bud; a doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

Apart from God nothing matters. We think that health matters, that freedom matters, or knowledge or art or civilization. And but for one insistent word they would matter indeed. That word is eternity.

Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored

If I hadn't learned my lesson, I would have wished we could stay there forever. But I knew better now. We'd seen what we'd come to see. The way to trick death. Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch as it all rises upwards, black and blue into the even bluer sky.

If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.

Death, thou art infinite; it is life is little.

The essence of what makes life beautiful is the fact that it can go away.

And one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea. But for now we are young; let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see.

I imagined what it would be like to hold a butterfly in your hands something bejeweled and treasured and to know that despite your devotion it was dying by degrees.

But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found, Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long preserv'd virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust. The grave's a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace.