Exposed upon the mountains of the heart. See how small over there
the last outpost of words, and higher up,
just as small, one last farmyard of feeling.
Do you recognize it? Exposed
upon the mountains of the heart. Stony ground
under the hands.

Something still blooms here, on the dumb cliff face
blooms an unconscious weed, singing.
But where is the conscious one? He who began to be conscious
now is silent, exposed upon the mountains of the heart. . . .

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

God will not let himself be lived like an easy morning.
Whoever enters that mineshaft
leaves wide-open earth behind,
crouches in tunnels to break Him loose.

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

Things are not nearly so comprehensible and sayable as we are generally made to believe. Most experiences are unsayable; they come to fullness in a realm that words do not inhabit. And most unsayable of all are works of art, which — alongside our transient lives — mysteriously endure.

— Rilke, Paris, February 17, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

What can enclose
this ample innerness?
So soft is this touch,
it could soothe any wound.
What skies are reflected
on the inland lake
of these open roses,
these untroubled ones?
See how loose they lie,
as if an abrupt gesture
would not scatter them.
They barely keep their shape.
They fill to overflowing
with inner space, spilling out
into days that swell
and close around them
until the whole summer becomes a room,
a room in a dream.

— Rilke, New Poems

I put down the cup of tea and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not exist yet, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

— Proust

On the street full of boxes, the loaders are cleaning the street. One by one, with laughter and wisecracks, they are putting the boxes on the trucks. From the vantage point of my office window I watch them with slow eyes on which the lids are sleeping. And anything subtle, incomprehensible, ties what I feel to the shipments I see being made up; any unknown sensation makes a box out of all this tedium of mine, or anguish, or nausea, and carries it on the shoulders of a joking man to a truck that is not here.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

You, God, who live next door:
If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking —
this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.
I know you’re all alone in that room.
If you should be thirsty, there’s no one
to get you a glass of water.
I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!
I’m right here.

As it happens, the wall between us
is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry
from one of us
break it down? It would crumble
easily,
it would barely make a sound.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 6

It is all about praising.
Created to praise, his heart
is a winepress destined to break,
that makes for us an eternal wine.

His voice never chokes with dust
when words for the sacred come through.
All becomes vineyard. All becomes grape,
ripening in the southland of his being.

Nothing, not even the rot
in royal tombs, or the shadow cast by a god,
gives the lie to his praising.

He is ever the messenger,
venturing far through the doors of the dead,
bearing a bowl of fresh-picked fruit.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 7

In the last analysis, I have a completely indescribable passion for experiencing God, and this God is unquestionably closer to that of the Old Testament than He is to the Messiah’s Gospels. I must admit that what I have most wanted in life has been to discover within myself a temple to earth, and to dwell therein.

— Rilke, Letter to Rudolf Zimmerman
March 10, 1922

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly here:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 59

Why not think of God as the one who is coming, who is moving toward us from all eternity, the Future One, culminating fruit of the tree whose leaves we are? What stops you from projecting his birth on times to come and living your life as a painful and beautiful day in the history of an immense pregnancy? Do you not see how all that is happening is ever again a new beginning? And could it not be His Beginning, for to commence is ever in itself a beautiful thing. If he is to be fulfillment, then all that is lesser must precede him, so that he can fashion himself from out of the greatest abundance. Must he not be last, in order to include everything within himself? And what meaning would be ours, if he, for whom we yearn, had already existed?

— Rilke, Rome, December 23, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet