Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

When you're poor, you know nothing about the future, you know nothing about the world, nothing that goes on outside 300 yards around you.

We have a very narrow view of what is going on.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

Denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view.

Many people who attack me know so little of that larger Tradition, and end up being not very traditional at all. When you invoke the whole and great Tradition, you end up scaring people who call 1950 America "traditional" Christianity. It is just what they are used to in their one limited lifetime.

It's all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops—for a split second.

The circle of our understanding is a very restricted area.

Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

The sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well.

You mortals are like fish swimming in a globe of glass. That globe is your world. You do not see beyond it.

I seem to have always one little window looking but into life.

People who don't have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.

Smallness of mind is the cause of stubbornness, and we do not credit readily what is beyond our view.

When you're a kid, you just have no concept of anything other than what you're doing.

No matter how revolutionary something is, if you keep doing it over and over and over then it does loses it's excitement and it's high dynamics and people get used to ... get used to it like anything else you know um and then it just becomes a normal deal and then it becomes not very interesting at all.

The fact is that in England so many of our politicians are career politicians - they've always been politicians since they left their education. And in the old days of course politicians used to be fish mongers or doctors or whatever. They'd lived life. These days, power seems to go to the hands of people that that's all they've done. And I'm not sure that's a good thing, because it does remove them from the realities of life.

There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.

Regularity chauvinists are people who insist that you have got to do the same thing every time, every day, which drives some of us nuts. Attention Deficit Disorder - we need a more positive term for that. Hummingbird mind, I should think.

People will tell me, "Oh, my kid watches your show on their iPad, over and over again until they memorize." And I'm like, "Wow, I was that kid watching other shows. That's the coolest!"

Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.

Each undervalues that part of the materials of thought with which he is not familiar.

Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost ... perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well.

A narrow mind begets obstinacy; we do not easily believe what we cannot see.

Mediocrity is excellent to the eyes of mediocre people.