Verified Quotes
Every quote on this page is verified against the named source work.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet whose Letters to a Young Poet became the definitive counsel against rushed, gets quoted everywhere and sourced almost nowhere. The 15 quotes below are different: each one is checked word for word against the cited work, starting with Letters to a Young Poet, not copied from aggregator sites that pass misattributions along. The source is named under every line, so you can trace each quote back to the page it came from.
Read Rainer Maria Rilke's full profile and how they reason →9 verified quotes
On sitting with a decision you are not ready to make:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
On taking a job before you have your five year plan figured out:
Live the questions now, and perhaps without knowing it, you will live along some day into the answer.Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
On responding to someone whose anger is really fear:
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
On testing whether a creative path is a calling or a whim:
Ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write?Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
On looking for an answer no one else can give you:
There is only one single way. Go into yourself.Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
On loving someone without gripping too tightly:
We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily, we do not need to learn it.Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Deciding whether to face down a fear instead of avoiding it again:
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Deciding how much independence to protect inside a serious relationship:
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Trusting a slow, unfinished project instead of rushing it to market:
Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
1 verified quote
On the moment a piece of art forces a decision:
You must change your life.Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo
1 verified quote
On riding out a grief that feels like it will never lift:
Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final.Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours
2 verified quotes
Deciding whether to pursue something beautiful that also frightens you:
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure.Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
Sitting with the isolation of a grief no one around you seems to notice:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
1 verified quote
Preparing yourself for a goodbye you can already see coming:
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
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Deciding whether to seek more solitude or more company:
I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make each hour holy.Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours