Rainer Maria Rilke

“To be alone again. As one was alone. As one will always be alone.”

“Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”

“Don't let yourself lose me.”

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”

“Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell.”

“Be earth now, and evensong. Be the ground lying under that sky.”

“Once a thing has been said, it is no longer the same thing.”

“Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe.”

“You must change your life.”

“He, who reconciled in his open look the contradictions of life — gold and silver, dawn and dust — bears in himself a single seed.”

“What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small.”

“What we fight for, the great winnings of our lives — these we do not win at all.”

“Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.”

“As if some little flower, before its time, brave in early spring, had brought a delicate beauty to a still snow-covered place.”

“And the seasons revolve and the days draw to their close.”

“Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.”

“And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses.”

“How shall I hold my soul that it may not be touching yours? How shall I lift it then beyond you to other things?”