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Who really said it

Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure

Not Rilke — a 1992 paraphrase by Sogyal Rinpoche Sogyal Rinpoche 1947–2019 · Tibetan Buddhist teacher, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Disputed In copyright

The sentence in this form first appears in Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (Harper San Francisco, 1992), page 39, where it is introduced as something Rilke “has said” — a paraphrase, not a quotation. Its endnote points to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, where the sentence does not appear.

Last verified 24 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure” not Rainer Maria Rilke. The sentence first appears in Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (Harper San Francisco, 1992), p. 39, offered as a paraphrase of Rilke. Rilke's own letter of 12 August 1904 likens the dragons of our lives to princesses waiting to see us act with beauty and courage — no treasure, no guarding. Via Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Rainer Maria Rilke. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Sogyal Rinpoche’s estate and HarperCollins Publishers). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Sogyal Rinpoche — Tibetan Buddhist teacher · founder of the Rigpa network. Theme: "Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure". 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 "Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure". 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

Where the sentence actually comes from

Work
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Author
Sogyal Rinpoche, edited by Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey
First published
1992 · Harper San Francisco (HarperCollins)
Location
Page 39, with an endnote referring readers to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, p. 92 — where the sentence does not appear

The Western poet Rainer Maria Rilke has said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure. The origin sentence, 1992

Note the framing: “has said that”, with no quotation marks. Rinpoche is summarising Rilke, not quoting him. Every later version drops the attributing clause and adds the quotation marks — which is precisely how a paraphrase becomes a quotation.

Zitatforschung’s investigation of the attribution

The paper trail

  • Every popular copy runs sourceless. Goodreads ↗ attributes the line to Rilke with no work, edition or page, and carries its standing notice that community-submitted quotes are not verified.
  • The trail ends at a 1992 bestseller. The quote-research site Zitatforschung ↗ found the first attribution of this sentence to Rilke in Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, page 39, where it is introduced as something Rilke “has said”.
  • The book’s own endnote points somewhere else. It sends readers to Letters to a Young Poet ↗ (Vintage, 1986), page 92 — the passage where Rilke likens the dragons of our lives to princesses waiting to see us act with beauty and courage. No treasure, nothing guarded.
  • It escaped into pop culture still wearing Rilke’s name. In Ted Lasso season 2, episode 5, ‘Rainbow’, Rebecca reads the line off a dating app and credits it to Rilke — as a fan transcript of the episode ↗ records.
In copyright

The wording people quote originates in a book first published in 1992, so it is under copyright in the United States. Rilke’s own Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, 1929) is public domain in the US as a pre-1931 publication — but that text does not contain this sentence, and the twentieth-century English translations of it are themselves separately in copyright.

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

How Rilke got the credit

This is a clean, fully documented case of a paraphrase hardening into a quotation. The writer who coined the sentence said openly that he was reporting Rilke’s idea; everyone downstream dropped the reporting and kept the quotation marks.

Rainer Maria Rilke Misattributed

No edition of Rilke has ever been shown to contain this sentence. Wikiquote’s sourced Rilke page ↗, which organises his lines by the work they come from, does not carry it in any section.

Sogyal Rinpoche’s endnote Mis-sourced

Rinpoche did give a citation — an endnote pointing to Letters to a Young Poet. But as Zitatforschung ↗ shows, the page it names carries the dragons-into-princesses passage instead; the treasure sentence is not there.

Quote aggregators Sourceless

Goodreads ↗ runs it as Rilke with no work, edition or page, under its own notice that community-added quotes are not verified. AZQuotes and QuoteFancy print it the same way.

Writers and screenwriters Repeated in good faith

A 2014 HuffPost essay ↗ on Tibetan Buddhist teachings about impermanence states flatly that Rilke said it — in an article otherwise drawing on Rinpoche’s own book.

The sentence is Sogyal Rinpoche’s, written in 1992 to summarise Rilke — and Zitatforschung ↗ found no attribution to Rilke earlier than that book.

Context

What Rilke actually wrote

Rilke did write about dragons — once, memorably, in a letter to the young officer cadet Franz Xaver Kappus dated 12 August 1904. He invokes the old myths in which a dragon turns into a princess at the last moment, and suggests that perhaps every dragon in our lives is a princess waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage; perhaps everything terrible is, at bottom, something helpless asking for our help. The letters were published in 1929 by Insel Verlag in Leipzig, three years after Rilke’s death, as Briefe an einen jungen Dichter.

There is no treasure in that passage and nothing is guarding anything. The hoard-and-guardian image — fear as a dragon coiled on top of something you want — is a different idea, and a more transactional one: Rilke asks you to love the frightening thing, while the popular line promises a reward on the other side of it. That second, tidier thought is the one that travels.

Rilke’s dragon becomes a princess. The internet’s dragon sits on a pile of gold.

How the paraphrase escaped the book

Sogyal Rinpoche’s sentence carries an endnote, and the book keeps that citation in later editions. But readers quoting the line rarely carried the endnote with it. Within two years, according to Zitatforschung, the sentence was appearing in quotation marks as Rilke’s own words with no mention of the book it came from — among the instances it cites are Dawna Markova’s No Enemies Within (Conari Press, 1994) and Caitlin Matthews’ Singing the Soul Back Home (Element, 1995).

Music and television did the rest. Ray Wylie Hubbard, who has said repeatedly that Letters to a Young Poet changed his life, closed “The Messenger” on his 1994 album Loco Gringo’s Lament with the same fear-as-dragon-over-treasure image, credited to Rilke. And in 2021 the line turned up on a dating app in Ted Lasso, where Rebecca reads it out as Rilke and Keeley approves.

German-language versions were re-translated back out of Rinpoche’s English rather than from anything Rilke wrote, which is why the German circulating text (“Unsere größten Ängste sind die Drachen, die unsere tiefsten Schätze bewahren”) matches no line in Rilke’s collected letters.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Courage Growth Purpose

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Zitatforschung: the full attribution trailfalschzitate.blogspot.com

The German quote-research blog that traced this line to Sogyal Rinpoche’s 1992 book and showed it is absent from Rilke.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1992)archive.org

The Internet Archive’s copy of the Harper San Francisco first edition where the sentence originates, on page 39.
Rilke, Briefe an einen jungen Dichterarchive.org

Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, 1932 — the German letters to Franz Xaver Kappus, including the dragons-into-princesses passage.
Letters to a Young Poet (Vintage, 1986)archive.org

The English edition Rinpoche’s endnote points to — page 92 carries the dragon passage, but not the treasure line.
Wikiquote: Rainer Maria Rilkeen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s sourced collection of Rilke, organised by work — this sentence does not appear anywhere on it.
Dawna Markova, No Enemies Within (1994)archive.org

Conari Press, 1994 — cited by Zitatforschung as an early instance of the line printed in quotation marks as Rilke’s own.

The paraphraser

The writer whose sentence this actually is

Sogyal Rinpoche

1947–2019 · Tibetan Buddhist teacher · founder of the Rigpa network

Sogyal Rinpoche was born in Trehor, Kham, in eastern Tibet in 1947 and founded Rigpa, an international network of Buddhist centres. His The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, assembled with editors Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey and published in 1992, became a global bestseller — more than three million copies in dozens of languages — and carried this sentence to a very large readership under Rilke’s name. He stepped back from Rigpa in 2017 after former senior students alleged abuse, and died in Bangkok in 2019.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, ed. Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992), 39. Attribution history documented in "Unsere größten Ängste sind die Drachen, die unsere tiefsten Schätze bewahren." Rainer Maria Rilke (angeblich), Zitatforschung (falschzitate.blogspot.com), 16 September 2021.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/our-deepest-fears-are-like-dragons-guarding-our-deepest/

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