Tag Archives: Ranier Maria Rilke

“Widening Circles,” Ranier Maria Rilke

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?



“Ingeborg,” Peter Nicolai Arbo, 1868

“Live the questions now.”

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.  Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1929

Source: English Literature info on Facebook



“Rilke in Moscow,” Leonid Pasternak, 1928