Rainer Maria Rilke

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Quotes...

• “In life one cannot awaken often enough the sense of a beginning within oneself. There is so little external change needed for that since we actually transform the world from within our hearts. If the heart longs for nothing but to be new and unlimited, the world is instantly the same as on the day of its creation and infinite.”
• “Through the transformation of your heart you will gradually influence the obstinate givens of reality; everything that seems impenetrable to you will be rendered transparent by your blazing heart … Don’t think too much about the moment and refrain from judging life during those hazy hours that afford us no glimpse of its vastness.”
• “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
• “You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.”
• “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”  
• “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
• “And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been”
• “There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.”
• “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
• “The only journey is the one within.”
• “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
• “Whatever is yet to come does not fall from the skies at the last moment but resides always already right next to us, around us and within out heart, waiting for the cue that will summon it to visibility.”
• “To go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.”
  
•  “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”
  

Poems...
Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final

God Speaks to Each of Us
God speaks to each of us before we are,
Before he's formed us — then, in cloudy speech,
But only then, he speaks these words to each
And silently walks with us from the dark:

Driven by your senses, dare
To the edge of longing. Grow
Like a fire's shadowcasting glare
Behind assembled things, so you can spread
Their shapes on me as clothes.
Don't leave me bare.

Let it all happen to you: beauty and dread.
Simply go — no feeling is too much --
And only this way can we stay in touch.

Near here is the land
That they call Life.
You'll know when you arrive
By how real it is.

Give me your hand.

“In life one cannot awaken often enough the sense of a beginning within oneself. There is so little external change needed for that since we actually transform the world from within our hearts. If the heart longs for nothing but to be new and unlimited, the world is instantly the same as on the day of its creation and infinite.”

Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke