{"quotes":[{"text":"The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to 'tell' us, those who have run away from form, something, because it quite obviously does not embody the intention to confine us. 'La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose' Something that exposes itself and proves itself in this test gains unpresumed authority. In the space of aesthetic simulation, which is at once the emergency space for the success and failure of the artistic construct, the powerless superiority of the works can affect observers who otherwise take pains to ensure that they have no lord, old or new, above them.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["art","ity","creativity","poetry","rilke"],"id":20219,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"She who reconciles the ill-matched threadsOf her life, and weaves them gratefullyInto a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hallAnd clears it for a different celebration.","author":"Rainer Maria Rilke","tags":["beauty","life","poetry","rilke","women"],"id":45637,"author_id":"Rainer+Maria+Rilke"},{"text":"And you, Clara Westhoff, how simply and well you endured, lived through the experience, and made it a forward step in your young existence! So great was your love that it was able to forgive the great dying, and your eye was so sure, even then, that it conceived beauty in all the new colors, feelings, and gestures of the earth, and that all coming to an end seemed for your feeling only a pretext under which Nature wanted to unfold beauties yet unrevealed. Just as the eyes of angels rest on a dying child, delighting in the similar transfiguration of its half-released little face, so without concern you saw in the dying earth the smile and the beauty and the trust in eternity.'―from letter to Clara Westhoff Schmargendorf (Sunday, November 18, 1900).","author":"Rainer Maria Rilke","tags":["beauty","eternity","nature","rilke"],"id":136894,"author_id":"Rainer+Maria+Rilke"},{"text":"In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["being","chatter","heidegger","language","linguistic-turn","rilke","thing-poem"],"id":143951,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.","author":"Gaston Bachelard","tags":["201","nature","rilke","space","trees"],"id":154815,"author_id":"Gaston+Bachelard"},{"text":"If you think your world isn’t poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that’s not because it’s a dull world, that’s because you’re not poet enough to wake its soul up.","author":"Rainer Maria Rilke","tags":["life","poet","rilke"],"id":197407,"author_id":"Rainer+Maria+Rilke"},{"text":"Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the clear bright sun of a frozen winter noon; the rise of Orion in the eastern evening sky-every day, every night, I give thanks for another chance to notice. I see beauty everywhere; so much beauty I often speak it aloud. So much beauty I often laugh, and my day is made.Still if you wanted to, I think, you could feel sadness without end. I’m not even talking about hungry children or domestic violence or endless wars between supposedly grown men…but ‘you mustn’t be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you even seen,' said Rilke, 'you must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in it hand and will not let you fall.","author":"Paul Bogard","tags":["awe","beauty","grateful-heart","gratitude","hope","love","night-sky","rilke","sadness","stargazing","stars","wonder"],"id":203433,"author_id":"Paul+Bogard"},{"text":"In the midst of the ubiquitous dealings with prostituted signs, the thing-poem was capable of opening up the prospect of returning to credible experiences of meaning. It did this by tying language to the gold standard of what things themselves communicate. Where randomness is disabled, authority should shine forth.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["ity","being","communication","poetry","randomness","rilke","thing-poem"],"id":259074,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiquities collection. The author's point is not that the thing depicts an extinct god who might be of interest to the humanistically educated, but that the god in the stone constitutes a thing-construct that is still on air. We are dealing with a document of how newer message ontology outgrew traditional theologies. Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and transmit, and more potent authority, than God, the ruling idol of religions. In modern times, even a God can find himself among the pretty figures that no longer mean anything to us - assuming they do not become openly irksome. The thing filled with being, however, does not cease to speak to us when its moment has come.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["ity","being","god","poet","poetry","rilke","thing-poem"],"id":264956,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.","author":"Rainer Maria Rilke","tags":["answers","future","living","questions","rainer-maria-rilke","rilke"],"id":273724,"author_id":"Rainer+Maria+Rilke"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":20,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}