Rainer Maria Rilke Biography Quotes 33 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Rainer Maria Rilke was born as Rene Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke on December 4, 1875, in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He grew up in a German-speaking milieu within a multicultural city, an experience that left him sensitive to language, place, and the tensions of identity. His father worked for the railways, and his mother had artistic aspirations; both hoped that strict schooling would provide stability for their son. As a boy he was sent to military academies in St. Polten and Moravian Weisskirchen, an environment for which he was temperamentally unsuited and from which he was eventually released for health reasons. Returning to civilian schooling, he studied in Prague and later attended universities in Prague and Munich, focusing on literature, art history, and philosophy. Early verse and prose experiments already showed a lyrical precision and introspective reach that would become hallmarks of his mature work.

Lou Andreas-Salome and the Awakening of a Poet
In the late 1890s Rilke met the writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salome, whose influence on his life and art was profound. She encouraged him to adopt the more Germanic form of his given name, and he became known thereafter as Rainer Maria Rilke. With Salome and her husband, the scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas, Rilke traveled to Russia, where he visited monasteries, encountered the icon-rich world of Orthodox devotion, and met Leo Tolstoy. The Russian journeys deepened his sense of spiritual searching and communal inwardness; these encounters fed directly into The Book of Hours, a cycle of poems whose speaker wrestles with God, the self, and the task of making visible what is inward. Rilke and Salome eventually ended their romantic relationship, but their intellectual exchange and correspondence endured.

Worpswede, Marriage, and the German Artistic Scene
Around 1900 Rilke spent time at the Worpswede artists colony in northern Germany. Immersed among painters and sculptors, including Paula Modersohn-Becker, he sharpened his eye for the material presence of things and the discipline of form. He married the sculptor Clara Westhoff, and their daughter Ruth was born soon after. The marriage was companionable yet strained by artistic demands and frequent separations; Rilke remained devoted to Clara as a colleague and friend even as his restless life drew him elsewhere. His essays and a monograph on the Worpswede circle reveal the seriousness with which he approached the visual arts as a guide for poetic craft.

Paris and the Discipline of Seeing
Rilke moved to Paris, drawn by the citys museums, studios, and the challenge of modern life. He became a close observer of Auguste Rodin, working for a period as the sculptors secretary and writing an insightful study of his methods. Rodins relentless ethic of work and his modeling of form from resistant material offered Rilke a decisive lesson: apply sculptural discipline to poetry. The result was the turn in his verse from mystical effusion to the crafted, object-focused poetics of the New Poems. Out of this Paris period also emerged The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a novel in diary form whose haunted urban perceptions and meditations on childhood, memory, illness, and death set a landmark for modernist prose. Rilkes letters from Paris include acute reflections on painting and museums; his responses to the work of Cezanne, for example, reveal how visual art reoriented his sense of color, contour, and the thingness of objects.

Patronage, Duino, and the Elegiac Voice
Rilke benefited from a network of friends and patrons who understood his exacting artistic needs. Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis invited him to her castle at Duino on the Adriatic. There, walking the cliffs in winter, Rilke began the Duino Elegies, hearing as he later recounted a voice that launched the first lines. These ambitious poems undertake questions of transience, praise, terror, beauty, and the place of human consciousness between angels and the world of things. The work proceeded in bursts and long silences. During these years he also sustained far-reaching correspondences, including the letters later published as Letters to a Young Poet, written to the cadet-poet Franz Xaver Kappus. In them Rilke counseled patience, solitude, and the search for necessity within ones work, advice that mirrors his own rigorous path.

War, Displacement, and the Swiss Years
The First World War found Rilke in Germany when hostilities began. He passed much of the conflict in relative isolation, later being called up and assigned clerical duties in the military bureaucracy before receiving discharge on medical grounds. The war, with its mass suffering and ideological rupture, deepened his awareness of cultural crisis and personal vulnerability. After the war he settled for long stretches in Switzerland. A patron enabled him to live and work at the Chateau de Muzot in the Valais, a setting that offered quiet and, at last, the concentration he had sought for years. There he experienced an extraordinary resurgence: he finished the Duino Elegies and, in a blaze of sustained inspiration, composed the Sonnets to Orpheus, two cycles that fuse praise and grief, song and metamorphosis, in compact, formally inventive language. During the Swiss years he also wrote poems in French, an extension of his linguistic reach and a testament to the cosmopolitan currents that had always nourished him.

Friendships, Correspondence, and Influence
Rilkes life was knit together by friendships that were as crucial to his practice as his solitary hours. He counted among his correspondents not only Lou Andreas-Salome and Princess Marie but also younger writers and artists who sought him out. Late in life he exchanged letters with Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, a triangular correspondence that testifies to his standing across languages and borders. His reflections on Rodin continued to shape the way poets could learn from sculptors and painters; he modeled a poetics that insists on the palpable presence of things while remaining alert to what exceeds them. Friends and patrons often sheltered him from practical demands so that he could write, yet they also challenged him to bring his gifts to completion. The generosity of figures such as Werner Reinhart, who supported his residence at Muzot, enabled the culminating achievements of 1922.

Illness and Death
In his final years Rilke suffered from a blood disorder diagnosed as leukemia. Periods of vigor alternated with debilitating weakness. He remained productive as strength allowed, tending to letters, revising manuscripts, and shaping a body of work whose inner architecture mattered deeply to him. He died on December 29, 1926, in Switzerland, after treatment at a sanatorium near Montreux. His grave in Raron, set high above the Rhone valley, bears an epitaph he had chosen, speaking of the rose and the incalculable secret of death, a final distillation of his lifelong effort to bring praise and mortality into a single, lucid music.

Legacy
Rilke stands among the most influential poets in the German language, though his life began in Prague and his travels and affiliations made him a European figure rather than a national one. From The Book of Hours to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, from the New Poems to the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, he forged a way of writing that marries inwardness to exact seeing and spiritual urgency to disciplined form. His letters, notably Letters to a Young Poet, continue to guide artists and readers with their counsel toward patience and necessity. Encounters with figures such as Lou Andreas-Salome, Auguste Rodin, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, and later Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak map a network of influence and friendship across decades and borders. The arc of his life, moving from a restless apprenticeship through disciplined craft to late transfiguration, still offers a model for how art might hold together the fracture of modern experience and the abiding human need to praise.

Our collection contains 33 quotes who is written by Rainer, under the main topics: Motivational - Wisdom - Love - Meaning of Life - Mother.

Other people realated to Rainer: Friedrich Nietzsche (Philosopher), Georg Simmel (Sociologist), Galway Kinnell (Poet)