Artvita › Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)

Rilke spent most of his adult life wandering — Paris, Rome, Scandinavia, Swiss castles — looking for the solitude he needed to write. Letters to a Young Poet, written to a nineteen-year-old military cadet, became one of the most read books of the twentieth century despite being private correspondence never intended for publication. The Duino Elegies took him ten years to finish. He wrote about love, death, solitude, and the difficulty of being alive with a precision that makes most other writers on these subjects sound like they are guessing.

Concepts

absurd, agency, authenticity, loneliness, love, meaning, mortality, solidarity

Notable Works

The Book of Hours (1905)
Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

Resonant Voices

Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rollo May, Thomas Mann

Quotes (6)

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of al...” — Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling ...” — The Book of Hours (1905)
“The only journey is the one within.” — Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to s...” — Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
“Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the si...” — Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
“Death is large. We are in his realm, laughing. When we think ourselves in the...” — The Book of Hours (1905)