When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk on the table: it attracts the dead.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Rilke warns that leaving food out at night may invite spirits, using superstition to caution about unwanted attention.
- In plain terms
- Leaving offerings can attract unwanted forces.
- What can you take from it?
- Be mindful of what you invite into your space.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- What personal boundaries do you need to set?
- How do rituals affect your mindset?
Another view
No evidence supports literal dead being attracted to food.
More from Rainer Maria Rilke
They more adeptly bend the willow's branches who have experience of the willow's roots.
Permalink to quote #28 Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible a…
Permalink to quote #30 A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence! Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear! And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence a new beginning, beckon…
Permalink to quote #27
Related quotes
When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, 'Southern California's special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere t…
Thomas PynchonThomas Pynchon quote #1 You have never, I think, known real Grief-panic, melancholia, madness, night-sweats, we've all known for most of our lives-you and me particularly. I'm not sur…
Diana CooperDiana Cooper quote #1 His death which happened in his berth, At forty-odd befell: They went and told the sexton, and The sexton tolled the bell.
Thomas HoodThomas Hood quote #1