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"Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing."
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"Each moment cancels the last. In the end there is nothing, not even the end."

"We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free.Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability!"

"Time is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at and who steals what is most precious to men."

"I knew from the start we were nothing like "forever". Maybe because forever is such a scary place."

"If there were a sympathy in choice,War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,Making it momentary as a sound,Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,Brief as the lightning in the collied nightThat, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'The jaws of darkness do devour it up;So quick bright things come to confusion."

"Time melts away in every passing moment."

"It is the nature of the circumstances to disperse. If there is attachment with the circumstance, there will be abhorrence when they get dispersed."

"When you're young you do think that things last forever unfortunately they don't Lyra."

"She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, 'All are shadows!-all are passing!-all is past!"

"Perception is to be blamed. It, if given due attention, keeps changing."
Explore more quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

"That's love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other."

"Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice."

"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further."

"Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,like winter, which even now is passing.For beneath the winter is a winter so endlessthat to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.Climb praising as you return to connection.Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.The emptiness inside you allows you to vibratein full resonance with your world. Use it for once.To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayablenumbers of beings abounding in Nature,add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost."

"Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being."

"Long you must suffer, knowing not what,until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit your suffering's taste comes forth in you.Then you will love almost instantly what's tasted. No one will ever talk you out of it."

"Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor futurelessens . . . . Superabundant existencewells in my heart."

"I would like to sing someone to sleep,to sit beside someone and be there.I would like to rock you and sing softlyand go with you to and from sleep.I would like to be the one in the housewho knew: The night was cold.And I would like to listen in and listen outinto you, into the world, into the woods.The clocks shout to one another striking,and one sees to the bottom of time.And down below one last, strange man walks byand rouses a strange dog.And after that comes silence.I have laid my eyes upon you wide;and they hold you gently and let you gowhen something stirs in the dark."
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