19 Quotes About Rilke

ستوجد المرأة يوماً ما، في زمنٍ لا يعني فيه اسمها شيئاً عكس الذكورة وحسب، بل شيئاً خاصاً بنفسه، شيئاً يُفكَّر فيه ويوصَف بكلماتٍ لا تهدف إلى التحديد والشمول، بل إلى الحياة والوجود

People come and go all the time, it’s ripping me to pieces and I was in a state of simply not caring about anything or anyone other than the very thought of not giving a damn anymore. People always leave, I thought, and I did not want to be excited.

Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

In the midst of the ubiquitous dealings with prostituted signs, the thing-poem was capable of opening up the prospect of returning to credible experiences of meaning. It did this by tying language to the gold standard of what things themselves communicate. Where randomness is disabled, authority should shine forth.

In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.

...until summer becomes ein Zimmer in einem Traum -- a room in a dream.

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization.

Success had put me on the wrong track and I did not know that there is a kind of success worse than failure, and a kind of failure worth all the success in the world. Neither did I know that the distant friendship of Rainer Maria Rilke would one day console me for having seen his lamp burn without knowing that it was signalling me to go and singe my wings against its flame.