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Exlpore more Mortality quotes

"Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand."

"In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me."

"The moment one is born, the 'saw starts cutting'. People consider it as death only when the wood breaks in two pieces [during funeral]. But it was being cut from the very beginning."
Explore more quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

"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."

"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."

"But not you, O girl, nor yet his mother,stretched his eyebrows so fierce with expectation.Not for your mouth, you who hold him now,did his lips ripen into these fervent contours.Do you really think your quiet footstepscould have so convulsed him, you who move like dawn wind?True, you startled his heart; but older terrorsrushed into him with that first jolt to his emotions.Call him . . . you'll never quite retrieve him from those dark consorts.Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved, he makes a homein your familiar heart, takes root there and begins himself anew.But did he ever begin himself?"

"Whoever you are, go out into the evening,leaving your room, of which you know every bit;your house is the last before the infinite,whoever you are."

"Then suddenly you're left all alonewith your body that can't love youand your will that can't save you."
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