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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Rainer Maria Rilke10 quotes
We need in love to practice only this:
Letting each other go. For holding on
Comes easily; we do not need to learn it. — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1909Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1901Love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you. — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1929Death is the side of life which is turned away from us. — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1925A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1929Who has not sat nervously before the stage curtain of his heart? — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1923All 10 quotes →Franz Kafka5 quotes
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka · 1904You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. — Franz Kafka · 1931When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. — Franz Kafka · 1915I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us... We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka · 1904Love is to me that you are the knife which I turn within myself. — Franz Kafka · 1920Vaclav Havel3 quotes
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less. — Vaclav Havel · 1983Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom, and under what circumstances we say it. — Vaclav Havel · 1985You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then when you have the chance to do it better refuse to go near it. — Vaclav Havel · 2007