A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.
Rainer Maria Rilke

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.
Rainer Maria Rilke

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
Rainer Maria Rilke

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
Rainer Maria Rilke


If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
Rainer Maria Rilke

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
Rainer Maria Rilke

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.
Rainer Maria Rilke

More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.
Rainer Maria Rilke

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke