"I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several"
About this Quote
Rilke notices that the city swarms not just with bodies but with faces, infinitely more numerous because each life wears many. A face is not a fixed emblem of identity; it is a shifting surface, a mask that changes with circumstance, role, fear, desire, and time. The observation carries the astonishment of someone learning to see again, registering how expression multiplies a single person into several presences. Where statistics count individuals, perception encounters a more fluid arithmetic: a crowd is a kaleidoscope of selves.
The line belongs to Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a 1910 modernist work steeped in the sensory intensity and estrangement of Paris. Malte wanders the city anxious and alert, trained by his apprenticeship to Rodin and his own poetic discipline to study surfaces. Faces in these pages are fragile, provisional, sometimes crumbling. They can be worn out by life, replaced by another, or hollowed by poverty and illness. To notice that everyone has several faces is to intuit the modern condition: identity scattered across social roles, performances, and curated appearances, with no single, stable self confidently behind them.
Yet the multiplicity is not merely accusatory. It points to the richness of human expressiveness. A face reflects the weather of the soul, and that weather changes. We adjust our features to meet others, to work, to love, to mourn; we inherit ancestral expressions and borrow gestures from the crowd. The self becomes visible through this repertoire, even as it risks becoming concealed by it.
Rilke’s phrasing also hints at ethical difficulty. If a person has several faces, which one do we meet, and how do we respond? The call is to attentiveness, to a patient seeing that does not freeze the other into a single image. Every encounter is tentative, provisional, a moment in an unfolding series. To really see another is to accept that their face is a living verb, not a noun.
The line belongs to Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a 1910 modernist work steeped in the sensory intensity and estrangement of Paris. Malte wanders the city anxious and alert, trained by his apprenticeship to Rodin and his own poetic discipline to study surfaces. Faces in these pages are fragile, provisional, sometimes crumbling. They can be worn out by life, replaced by another, or hollowed by poverty and illness. To notice that everyone has several faces is to intuit the modern condition: identity scattered across social roles, performances, and curated appearances, with no single, stable self confidently behind them.
Yet the multiplicity is not merely accusatory. It points to the richness of human expressiveness. A face reflects the weather of the soul, and that weather changes. We adjust our features to meet others, to work, to love, to mourn; we inherit ancestral expressions and borrow gestures from the crowd. The self becomes visible through this repertoire, even as it risks becoming concealed by it.
Rilke’s phrasing also hints at ethical difficulty. If a person has several faces, which one do we meet, and how do we respond? The call is to attentiveness, to a patient seeing that does not freeze the other into a single image. Every encounter is tentative, provisional, a moment in an unfolding series. To really see another is to accept that their face is a living verb, not a noun.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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