Five Quotes from Rainer Rilke

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.

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

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

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

Is It Too Late?

The famous writer and novelist George Eliot (1819-1880) was actually Mary Anne Evans. Because of her personal life and her desire to be taken seriously as a writer, she adopted the masculine pen name “George Eliot.” Her works endure and her place in literary history is secure – except that she is overwhelmingly known as George Eliot, not Mary Anne Evans. What makes this even more ironic is that my favorite quote is a quote from her:

“It is never go late to be what you might have been.”

How sad that she could never be known for who she really was. How sad that many of us will make the same mistake.

Defeat By Constantly Greater Beings

The Man Watching
by Rainer Maria Rilke


I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.

Cyber-Hedonism

"The question in many internet-watchers’ minds is this: as young surfers are exposed to facts, sights, sounds and a range of interlocutors that are far beyond their parents’ ken, how will they use that access? Will they try to change the world, or simply settle for enjoying themselves?

"There is so much evidence of the latter choice that pundits have invented a new word—cyber-hedonism—to describe it. To the dismay of idealists, young people in many countries seem to be giving up the political struggles of previous generations and opting instead for a sort of digital nirvana, reveling in a vast supply of movies, music, instant communication and of course, sexual opportunity."

Welcome to the Brave New World.

From Economist.com, February 10, 2009