Rilke and Salome

Rainer Maria Rilke was a great German poet, mystic and philosopher who wrote about the journey within, and the importance of Love in a man's life. He was influenced by his love for Lou Andreas Salome. 

Some of his famous quotes on Love:

".... believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it."

"Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things." 

"We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it." 


"It is part of the nature of every definitive love, that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity."

In his love letters to Salome, Rilke writes:

Then your letter brought me its gentle benediction

And I knew there are no distant places:

From all that's beautiful you come towards me

You my spring breeze, my summer rain,

My June night with its many thousand paths

None before me was blessed to tread:

I am alive in you !

From a poem dedicated to Salome:

For I don't think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don't invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you've gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when,
for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.