# Rilke's most famous lines

"You must change your life", "Who talks of victory? To endure is everything" and the questions you should learn to love: the most quoted lines of Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Hours to the Duino Elegies.

- 4 votes · 13 items
- Jan 3, 2021 · fraunetzfund
- https://even.best/en/l/4998/rilke-s-most-famous-lines

## Top 13

1. **Who talks of victory? To endure is everything.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Requiem for Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth (1908).
2. **Every angel is terrifying.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Duino Elegies, First Elegy (1923).
3. **Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Duino Elegies, First Elegy (1923).
4. **Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight of being no one's sleep under so many lids.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — His epitaph, chosen by him in 1925.
5. **You must change your life.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo", New Poems (1908).
6. **…to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves…** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Letters to a Young Poet (letter of 1903).
7. **Ah, in my wild heart, homeless, eternity spends the night.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Poem "Strange word" (Poems 1910-1926).
8. **That is longing: to dwell in the surge and have no home in time.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — In Celebration of Myself (1899).
9. **For poverty is a great radiance from within.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — The Book of Hours, "The Book of Poverty and Death" (1903).
10. **O Lord, give each of us our own death.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — The Book of Hours, "The Book of Poverty and Death" (1903).
11. **There are many people, but even more faces, for each person has several.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910).
12. **When poor people are thinking, one should not disturb them. Perhaps it will come to them after all.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910).
13. **Somewhere the flower of parting blooms and endlessly scatters its pollen, which we breathe.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Poem "Somewhere the flower of parting blooms" (1924).

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.