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"Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."
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"There are advantages to being a star though - you can always get a table in a full restaurant."

"Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid."

"So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level."

"I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him."

"Being a press secretary is like learning to type: You're hunting and pecking for a while and then you find yourself doing the touch system and don't realize it. You're speaking for the president without ever having to go to him."

"Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch."

"I'm so gullible. I'm so damn gullible. And I am so sick of me being gullible."
Explore more quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

"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."

"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."

"The one so loved that a single lyreraised more lament than lamenting women ever did;and that from the lament a world arose in whicheverything was there again: woods and valleyand path and village, field and river and animal;and around this lament-world, just asaround the other earth, a sunand a starry silent heaven turned,a lament-heaven of disordered stars -- :This one so loved."

"His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world."

"We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience."
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