Let life happen to you.

All quotes by poet Rainer Maria Rilke

"Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final"

"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."

"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of."

--'Letters to a Young Poet'

"But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths."

"It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case."

"Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over...Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush."

"And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it."

--'Letters to a Young Poet'

"And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything."

--'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge'

"We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors."

"Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart."

“Why then, have to be human?

Oh not because happiness exists,

Not out of curiosity..

But because being here means so much;

because everything here,

vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,

and strangely keeps calling to us.. To have been

here, once, completely, even if only once,

to have been at one with the earth -

this is beyond undoing.”