The Best of Rilke Quotes

“So it's back once more, back up the slope.
Why do they always ruin my rope
with their cuts?
I felt so ready the other day,
Had a real foretaste of eternity
In my guts.

Spoonfeeding me yet another sip
from life's cup.
I don't want it, won't take any more of it.
Let me throw up.

Life is medium rare and good, I see,
And the world full of soup and bread,
But it won't pass into the blood for me,
Just goes to my head.

It makes me ill, though others it feeds;
Do see that I must deny it!
For a thousand years from now at least
I'm keeping a diet.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-true Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary and Compact Biography

“Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-true Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary and Compact Biography

“Forest! They seek your trees to sleep among,
With their long sentences hung. Forest!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-true Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary and Compact Biography

“How they are all about, these gentlemen
In chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced,
Like night around their order's star and gem
And growing ever darker, stony-faced,
And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but propped
High by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped,
Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles:
How they surround each one of these who stopped
To read and contemplate the objects d'art,
Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours.

Whit exquisite decorum they allow us
A life of whose dimensions we seem sure
And which they cannot grasp. They were alive
To bloom, that is be fair; we, to mature,
That is to be of darkness and to strive.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-true Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary and Compact Biography