And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadness, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own...

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And those, who come together in the night and are twined in quivering pleasure, are performing a serious work and are heaping up sweetness, depth and force for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to express inexpressible ecstasies

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And when suddenly the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry, uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ –she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And you, Clara Wythoff, how simply and well you endured, lived through the experience, and made it a forward step in your young existence! So great was your love that it was able to forgive the great dying, and your eye was so sure, even then, that it conceived beauty in all the new colors, feelings, and gestures of the earth, and that all coming to an end seemed for your feeling only a pretext under which Nature wanted to unfold beauties yet unrevealed. Just as the eyes of angels rest on a dying child, delighting in the similar transfiguration of its half-released little face, so without concern you saw in the dying earth the smile and the beauty and the trust in eternity."―from letter to Clara Wythoff Schmargendorf (Sunday, November 18, 1900)

— Rainer Maria Rilke