Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

We are an episode between two oblivions.

Faith, sir, we are here today, and gone tomorrow.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time.

A mass of dust, world's momentary slave, Is man, in state of our old Adam made, Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.

Oh my God, if I know anything, I know I'm gonna die! I never forget that. I know I'll be forgotten in a minute, and that's just fine with me.

We pass through this world but once.

Our time on Earth is so random.

For every person who has ever lived there has come, at last, a spring he will never see. Glory then in the springs that are yours.

Mankind is a dream of a shadow.

And lo, between the sundawn and the sun His day's work and his night's work are undone: And lo, between the nightfall and the light, He is not, and none knoweth of such an one.

Man, like a light in the night, is kindled and put out.

Nature has given man no better thing than shortness of life.

Nothing lives long Only the earth and mountains

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

Continuously thou wilt look at human things as smoke and nothing at all; especially if thou reflectest at the same time, that what has once changed will never exist again in the infinite duration of time. But thou, in what a brief space of time is thy existence? And why art thou not content to pass through this short time in an orderly way?

The world's a bubble, and the life of man, Less than a span.

Letting go all else, cling to the following few truths. Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant: all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come - dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

As leaves on the trees, such is the life of man.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.