The thought is genuinely Rilke’s and the letter is real — but the greeting-card wording is not his. Writing to his wife Clara from the Villa Discopoli on Capri on 1 January 1907, Rilke ended the letter, “And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been…” (1945 Greene & Norton translation ↗). The popular line replaces “let us believe in a long year that is given to us” with “we welcome the new year” — a rewrite, not a translation.
“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been” Paraphrased from Rainer Maria Rilke. The line "And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been" rewrites a sentence from Rilke's letter to his wife Clara, written at the Villa Discopoli, Capri, 1 January 1907: "And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been…" — Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892–1910, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (W. W. Norton, 1945), p. 253. Traced by Quotle.info.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the themes of hope, change and time. Theme: "And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The letter it really comes from
Source
Letter to Clara Rilke
Written
1 January 1907, Villa Discopoli, Capri
Published in
Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892–1910
Translation
Jane Bannard Greene & M. D. Herter Norton (W. W. Norton, 1945), p. 253
And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been…
Sentence continues
The published sentence runs on past this point — work that has never been done, tasks, claims and demands — and closes the letter. Wording is the 1945 Greene and Norton translation, which is still under copyright, so only the opening clause is reproduced here.
The genuine sentence closes a letter headed “To Clara Rilke — Villa Discopoli, Capri (Italy), January 1, 1907.” The full text is readable in the scanned 1945 Greene and Norton translation ↗, whose translators’ note says the letters were taken from the Insel-Verlag collection edited by Rilke’s daughter and son-in-law, Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber.
WIST Quotations ↗, a sourced quotation database, files the passage under that exact letter date and records that it is commonly shortened to “And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.”
Wikiquote’s Rilke page ↗ carries no entry for the New Year line at all — not in its sourced material and not among its flagged attributions. Quote Investigator has not published on it either.
A magazine essay, “The Poetry Resolution” ↗, begins with a holiday card printed with the short line, traces it to the Capri letter, and notes that the card’s wording differs from the letter’s.
Rilke wrote the letter in German in 1907 and died in 1926, but the English wording shown here is not his — it is the Greene and Norton translation, published by W. W. Norton in 1945 ↗ and marked “Copyright, 1945, by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.” A translation published in 1945 is under its own United States copyright, and the edition is still a Norton title ↗, so this English text is quoted here only in the short extract needed to check the attribution.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What went wrong on the way to the greeting card
This is not a fabricated quote — there is a real letter, on a real date, in a real book. What has gone missing is Rilke’s actual sentence. The circulating version keeps six words of the published translation and replaces the rest.
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The wordingGreeting cards, quote-image sites and social posts Paraphrase
The published English reads “And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been…” The popular line swaps the opening clause for “we welcome the new year,” which is a rewrite rather than a variant rendering — the German turns on believing in a year that has been given, not on welcoming one (1945 translation, in full ↗).
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The sourceGoodreads, AZQuotes and similar aggregators No citation
Both list the short form under Rilke’s name with no letter, no date, no book and no translator; Goodreads adds that its quotes are community-submitted and unverified (AZQuotes entry ↗).
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The formAnthologies and social graphics that present it as a poem Wrong genre
It is prose from private correspondence, not verse. The passage has been broken into lines and typeset as a New Year poem in several arrangements, which is part of why the wording drifts (on the recast versions ↗).
✓The idea is Rilke’s, and it is datable to the day — 1 January 1907, in a letter to Clara Rilke from Capri — but the fourteen-word version on the card is a condensation nobody has traced to a published translation (letter and paraphrase, side by side ↗).
Context
What he was actually looking at
Rilke spent that New Year’s Eve alone. Clara was in Germany; he was staying at the Villa Discopoli on Capri. He went out after eleven expecting a midnight Mass, and the letter he wrote the next morning describes what he found instead: lanes striped black and white by wall-shadow and the first moon after the full, olive leaves cut out of night sky, a knot of Capri youths on the little piazza under the clock tower, a tambourine rattling out of a red-curtained coffee-house — and a church shut, “as if it had been closed for decades.”
Only after all that does the famous sentence arrive. He had gone back to his little house and climbed up on its roof, wanting to see a good end in what had passed and find a good beginning in himself. The line is not a toast to a crowd; it is one husband asking his absent wife to believe in the year with him.
Rilke did not welcome the new year. He asked Clara to believe in it.
The German, and why the short version travels better
In German the key phrase is voll nie gewesener Dinge — “full of things that have never been” — inside a sentence that begins with believing in a long year that has been given to us (German text and letter context ↗). The half that survived into greeting cards is the half that needs no grammar around it.
The prose passage has also been recast and typeset as a poem in various forms, which is part of why the wording drifts so freely: once a sentence from a letter is broken into lines, nobody expects it to match a page in a book.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1875–1926 · Austrian poet · Letter to Clara Rilke, Capri, 1 January 1907
Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and died in Switzerland in 1926, and is one of the most widely translated poets in the German language — best known for the Duino Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus, and Letters to a Young Poet. He married the sculptor Clara Westhoff in 1901; the correspondence between them runs for decades and is a substantial part of his published work. The New Year sentence comes not from a poem but from one of those letters, written from Capri while the two were living apart.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The letter, as published in English
Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke, 1 January 1907, in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892–1910, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1945), 253.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/and-now-we-welcome-the-new-year-full-of-things-that-have/