Geschichten Vom Lieben Gott
1900
The spiritual philosophy that would define Rilke's entire career first blooms in these stories, composed when he was just twenty-three. Inspired by a journey through Russia the previous year, where he encountered a people who seemed to carry God in their daily lives, Rilke began imagining a faith stripped of doctrine and rebuilt from wonder. These interconnected tales approach the divine through children's eyes, not because children are innocent, but because they ask the only questions that matter: Where is God? What does God do with His hands? Why does creation feel so vast and lonely? In Rilke's vision, God is not a distant father but a maker absorbed in His work, someone who forgets the world in the act of creating it and then longs to be found. The stories possess the gentle power of folktales read by firelight, but they harbor something urgent beneath their sweetness: a conviction that God seeks us as desperately as we seek Him. All the themes that would flower in his later poetry are here in seed form, yet rendered with an accessibility that makes this perhaps the most beloved of Rilke's works. For readers ready to encounter the divine not as doctrine but as longing.
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“To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out: “I am an evening cloud too.” They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me. Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings. That is how evening clouds greet each other. They had recognized me.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“There comes a time when we have deposited in it all our firstlings, all beginning, all confidence, the seeds of all that which might perhaps some day come to be. And suddenly we realize: All that has sunk into a deep sea, and we don't even know just when. We never noticed it. As though some one were to collect all his money, and buy a feather with it and stick the feather in his hat: whish!--the first breeze will carry it away. Naturally he arrives home without his feather, and nothing remains for him but to look back and think when it would have flown.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“ghost of a distant author, with the disturbing presence of the foreign text, and with the phantom of the reader.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“The things we experience often cannot be expressed, and anyone who insists on telling them nevertheless, is bound to make mistakes…””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“passionate reader of books in German, her favorites to date include Stiller by Max Frisch, Die Wand by Marlen Haushofer, Die Große Liebe by Hans-Josef Ortheil, Selina by Walter Kappacher, Der verschlossene Garten by Undine Gruenter, as well as the poetry of Heinrich Heine, Georg Trakl, Ingeborg Bachmann, and, of course, Rainer Maria Rilke. Gunilla currently divides her time between the Baltic Sea and the Italian Alps, where she enjoys spending time with her family, her boyfriend and her red Somali cat, Polzerino.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Happily, somewhere in the heart of darkness, my optimism prevailed.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“[...] gal mirusieji yra tie, kurie išėjo pamąstyti apie gyvenimą.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
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Rilke, Rainer Maria. Geschichten Vom Lieben Gott. Lex, lex-books.com/book/geschichten-vom-lieben-gott-39765d45-1dac-47da-8a69-226620338228.Rilke, R. M. (1900). Geschichten Vom Lieben Gott. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/geschichten-vom-lieben-gott-39765d45-1dac-47da-8a69-226620338228Rilke, Rainer Maria. Geschichten Vom Lieben Gott. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/geschichten-vom-lieben-gott-39765d45-1dac-47da-8a69-226620338228.












