Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Who shows a child as he really is? Who sets him in his constellation and puts the measuring-rod of distance in his hand?

No, we don’t accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love.

And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.

I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.

Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.