Rainer Maria Rilke: Frases en inglés (página 2)

Fuente: Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Variante: For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.
Fuente: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Contexto: People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. 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.

Fuente: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Wendung (Turning Point), as translated by Stephen Mitchell

Fuente: Letters to a Young Poet

As quoted in Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990) by Sy Safransky, p. 42

Fuente: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Letter One (17 February 1903) as translated by M. D. Herter Norton (1993)
Fuente: Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Fuente: Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Contexto: The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them. But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence — then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.

You Who Never Arrived (as translated by Stephen Mitchell) (1913-1914)
Contexto: You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment.

Variante: What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain.
Fuente: Letters to a Young Poet