Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

She walked in the shadow of Rango with a great feeling of being taken out of herself, of having no knowledge of what was happening to her, merely a pervading sense of flow.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

There are no explanations, there are no answers.

Sometimes I would make myself very still and try to imagine myself dead. I tried to invoke the feeling of the very last breath I would take.

If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.

Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.

Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.

I don't know if I believe in life after death so much as I believe that there is something out there.

There is something joyous about not talking.

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore.

The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.

It is the basic principle of spiritual life that we learn the deepest things in unknown territory. Often it is when we feel most confused inwardly and are in the midst of our greatest difficulties that something new will open. We awaken most easily to the mystery of life through our weakest side. The areas of our greatest strength, where we are the most competent and clearest, tend to keep us away from the mystery.

The final mystery is oneself... Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul.

Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way.

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death Perhaps the world can teach us as when everything seems dead but later proves to be alive.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

One does not always know how to express the sorrow of the soul. One does not always know how to silence the joy of the heart.

Religion and philosophy have their value, but in the end all we can do is open to mystery and live a path with heart

The old grey donkey, Eeyore stood by himself in a thistly corner of the Forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, "Why?" and sometimes he thought, "Wherefore?" and sometimes he thought, "Inasmuch as which?" and sometimes he didn't quite know what he was thinking about.

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.

I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart for the joys of the multitude. And I would not have the tears that sadness makes to flow from my every part turn into laughter. I would that my life remain a tear and a smile.

Science tells me God must exist. My mind tells me I will never understand God. And my heart tells me I am not meant to.

I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.