"To work is to live without dying."
–– Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist
Source: Deborah Levy. Real Estate: A Living Autobiography. Toronto, ON: Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2021; p. 169.
via: Commonplace Book 2022, 2022, p. 96.
"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further."
–– Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist
via 2020 Aboveground Art Supplies Knapsack Sketchbook, 2022 p. 22.
"Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
–– Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist
via: Sketchbook 27, 2015, p. 76.
"God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out, beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows that I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand."
Book of Hours I 59
–– Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist
via: Sketchbook A, 2015, p. 23
"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 creative, there is no poverty."
–– Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist
via Sketchbook 20, 2012, p. 60
"Perhaps everything terrible in us is in its deepest being something helpless that needs help."
–– Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist
via Book of Commonplace 2004-2005, p. 153.
"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 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."
–– Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist
via Book of Commonplace 2003-2004, p. 166.
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| Rilke quote illustrated by Karen Thiessen, 2012 Giant Pinwheel pattern in background © Karen Thiessen, 2012 |
