# Rainer Maria Rilke - Quotes: 33 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke ## Books - [Letters to a Young Poet](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet.md) — 29 quotes - [Sonnets to Orpheus](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/sonnets-to-orpheus.md) — 3 quotes - [The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/the-notebooks-of-malte-laurids-brigge.md) — 4 quotes ## Recently added quotes > Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/be-patient-toward.md) > Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and suppose they mean something shared by all? — Only consider two schoolboys: one of them buys a knife, and the other buys an identical one on the same day. And a week later, they show each other the two knives, and they turn out to be only remotely similar, so differently have they been shaped by different hands. ... Is it possible to believe we could have a god without making use of him? p. 16 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/the-notebooks-of-malte-laurids-brigge/is-it-possible.md) > A thought struck me abruptly: My God, you do exist, then. There are proofs of Your existence. I had forgotten them all, and never demanded any either, for what an overwhelming obligation would come with this certainty. And yet that is what is now being shown to me. p. 135 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/the-notebooks-of-malte-laurids-brigge/a-thought-struck.md) > Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/love-is-at-first.md) > Young people -it is obvious -cannot achieve such a relationship, but they can, if they understand their life properly, grow up slowly to such happiness and prepare themselves for it. They must not forget, when they love, that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love- must learn love, and that like all learning wants peace, patience, and composure. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/young-people-it-is-obvious.md) > Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/young-people-who.md) > Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/love-is-something.md) > It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/it-seems-to-me-that.md) > No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/no-experience-has.md) > Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/sex-is-difficult.md) > Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in unproductive moments. In productive ones try to make use of it as one more means of seizing life. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/irony-do-not.md) > If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/if-your-daily.md)