Rainer Maria Rilke
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"René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke" — better known as "Rainer Maria Rilke" — was a Bohemian-Austria-Hungary/Austrian poet and novelist, "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German language/German-language poets", writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described Rilke's work as inherently "mystical". His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry, and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety. These deeply existential themes tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the Modernism/modernist writers.

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For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Everything terrible is something that needs our love.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.

There are quantities of human faces, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.

If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; 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 indifferent place.

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.

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty... Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess.

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.

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

Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.