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"I love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters,the days of my life, already lived,and held like a legend, and understood."
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Exlpore more Reflection quotes
"The problem was I always took the blame. But he was wrong. But I thought me taking the blame could fix it."
"Most of us would benefit greatly from recognizing and accepting the difference between our history and our destiny."
"When we access ourselves wrongly, we cannot see our ability to achieve a goal."
"I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?"
"A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another."
"And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor - And this, and so much more?"
"When the minds of men slip from realities to fantasies without thinking of the future consequences, then we must ponder. When the hearts of men are entangled with what though might seem great but yet, specious ambitions without pondering over the resulting footprints, then we ought to take precautions. When the hands of men unwittingly and for the sake of self-gratification find the right weapons and dexterity for the wrong purpose, then massacre and cruelties leave indelible footprints of sorrow and bitterness in the hearts of men. We shall always look back to the footprints of yesterday to say had we know if we don't take a critical look at today's footsteps. There is always an alternative that is better than good."
"Solitude is a wonderful treasure the world is still yet to discover."
"Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it had to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun."
"Write a complaint letter. Then answer it."
Explore more quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke
"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."
"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."
"Then suddenly you're left all alonewith your body that can't love youand your will that can't save you."
"This is the creature there has never been.They never knew it, and yet, none the less,they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.Not there, because they loved it, it behavedas though it were. They always left some space.And in that clear unpeopled space they savedit lightly reared its head, with scarce a traceof not being there. They fed it, not with corn,but only with the possibilityof being. And that was able to confersuch strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.within the silver mirror and in her."
"Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating."
"How surely gravity's law,strong as an ocean current,takes hold of the smallest thingand pulls it toward the heart of the world.Each thing---each stone, blossom, child---is held in place.Only we, in our arrogance,push out beyond what we each belong tofor some empty freedom.If we surrenderedto earth's intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselvesin knots of our own makingand struggle, lonely and confused.So like children, we begin againto learn from the things,because they are in God's heart;they have never left him.This is what the things can teach us:to fall,patiently to trust our heaviness.Even a bird has to do thatbefore he can fly."
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