Quotations

"Look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before."

— Jacob Riis, Danish-American photographer, died May 26, 1914

"For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem of proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet, born 1875

"Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day when the judgement is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed this one single face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or state of mind in which we perceive it —: this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet, born 1875

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. 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 now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet, born 1875

"Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet, born 1875

"Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet, born 1875

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet, born 1875

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that needs our love."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet, born 1875

"Poetry is a God breathing."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet, born 1875

"I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance."

— Arthur Rimbaud, French poet, born October 20, 1854

"I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still."

— Arthur Rimbaud, French poet, died November 10, 1891

"The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none."

— Arthur Rimbaud, French poet, born October 20, 1854

"Yet this is the watch by night. Let us all accept new strength, and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory."

— Arthur Rimbaud, French poet, died November 10, 1891

"What an old maid I'm getting to be—lacking the courage to be in love with death!"

— Arthur Rimbaud, French poet, died November 10, 1891