Talk:Rainer Maria Rilke

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"The only journey is the one within" is commonly attributed to Rilke. Did he write or say any such thing?

I can't find it anywhere authoritative. The oldest occurrence I find in Google Books is in Laurence G. Boldt, Zen and the Art of Making a Living (1999), page 129.

Unsourced

• No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
  • 'Letter To His Wife'.
  • I found a not-very-close-match, which conceivably could be an alternate translation from what I presume to be the original German, in a letter to Clara, his wife, dated 24 June 1907:

"Works of art are indeed always products of having-been-in-danger, of having-gone-to-the-very-end in an experience, to where no man can go further." This is from letter #157 in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, Vol I (1892–1910), p. 185, published in 1945 and translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton.

Here is a fuller context: "Works of art are indeed always products of having-been-in-danger, of having-gone-to-the-very-end in an experience, to where no man can go further. The further one goes, the more one's own, the more personal, the more unique an experience becomes, and the work of art, finally, is the necessary, irrepressible, most valid possible expression of this uniqueness.... Herein lies the tremendous help of the work of art for the life of the person who must make it: that it is his rallying of strength; the knot in the rosary at which his life speaks a prayer, the ever-recurrent proof of his unity and trueness, but directed only toward himself and to the outer world working anonymously, unnamed, as necessity only, as reality, existence." --Hughh (talk) 02:14, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Original German unknown

• When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.
  • 'To Clara Rilke' (Hotel Florence, Viareggio presso Pisa; March 27, 1903) from letter #42 in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, Vol I (1892–1910), p. 94, published in 1945 and translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton.
  • Quoted in Elementary episode Nobody Lives Forever (season 06, episode 09).