Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes About Birds

Quotes about: Birds

• This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Fall, Bird, Teach

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2005). “In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus”, Riverhead Books (Hardcover)

• Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Morning, Flower, Animal

  Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.112, W. W. Norton & Company

• A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world's.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Heart, Sky, Bird

• Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Yesterday, Bird, Evening

  Rainer Maria Rilke, “You Who Never Arrived”

• O trees of life, O when are you wintering?We are not unified. We have no instinctslike those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,and fall down to an indifferent lake.We realise flowering and fading together.And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Fall, Wind, Knowing

• Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner -- what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Stars, Cutting, Wind

• If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So like children, we begin again... to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. (from the poem "How Sure Gravity's Law")

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Lonely, Children, Confused

• You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house - , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon, - you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Country, Garden, Mirrors

  Rainer Maria Rilke, “You Who Never Arrived”

• The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven... in the ponds broken off from the sky. . .

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Sky, Rivers, Broken

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2004). “Sonnets to Orpheus”, p.32, Shambhala Publications

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