Rainer Maria Rilke

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

If your everyday life seems poor, do not blame it; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.

You are so young; you stand before beginnings.  I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.  Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.  Do not now look for the answers.  They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.  It is a question of experiencing everything.  At present you need to live the question.  Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

Illuminated in your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

For it is not simply because of mere sluggishness alone that human relationships repeat themselves from case to case in such unspeakably monotonous and unfrefreshed ways; there is also a certain shyness for new, unforeseeable experiences generally, because one doesn't feel up to them. But only for the one who is on the lookout for everything, who excludes nothing not even the most enigmatic, will the relationship to another become something alive and speak to the whole potential of one's existence.

A Walk

 My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Everything beckons to us to perceive it,
murmurs at every turn ‘Remember me!’
A day we passed, too busy to receive it,
will yet unlock us all its treasury.

Who shall compute our harvest?  Who shall bar
us from the former years, the long departed?
What have we learnt from living since we started,
except to find in others what we are?

Except to re-enkindle commonplace?
O house, O sloping field, O setting sun!
Your features form into a face, you run,
you cling to us, returning our embrace!

One space spreads through all creatures equally-
Inner-world-space.  Birds quietly flying go
flying through us.  Oh, I that want to grow,
the tree I look outside at grows in me!

It stands in me, that house I look for still,
in me that shelter I have not possessed.
I, the now well-beloved: on my breast
this fair world’s image clings and weeps her fill.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches. 

The Panther
His gaze has from the passing of the bars
grown so tired, that it holds nothing anymore.
It seems to him there are a thousand bars
and behind a thousand bars no world.

The supple pace of powerful soft strides,
turning in the very smallest circle,
is like a dance of strength around a center
in which a great will stands numbed.

Only sometimes the curtain of the pupils
soundlessly slides up --. Then an image enters,
glides through the limbs' taut stillness,
dives into the heart and dies.