Rilke wrote this in the eighth of his Letters to a Young Poet, sent to the cadet Franz Xaver Kappus from Borgeby gård in Sweden on 12 August 1904 and first published in German in 1929. The exact English wording quoted everywhere — “act, just once, with beauty and courage” — is Stephen Mitchell’s 1984 translation, confirmed in the Random House edition; earlier English versions word it differently.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, eighth letter, Borgeby gård, Sweden, 12 August 1904. This English wording is Stephen Mitchell's 1984 translation (Random House); the German original was first published in 1929. Verified by quotle.info
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Provenance
The eighth letter, Borgeby gård, 1904
Work
Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet)
Letter
Eighth letter to Franz Xaver Kappus — Borgeby gård, Flädie, Sweden, 12 August 1904
Stephen Mitchell, Random House, 1984 — the source of the exact English wording
Wie sollten wir jener alten Mythen vergessen können, die am Anfange aller Völker stehen, der Mythen von den Drachen, die sich im äußersten Augenblick in Prinzessinnen verwandeln; vielleicht sind alle Drachen unseres Lebens Prinzessinnen, die nur darauf warten, uns einmal schön und mutig zu sehen. Vielleicht ist alles Schreckliche im tiefsten Grunde das Hilflose, das von uns Hilfe will.
Eighth letter · 12 August 1904
Rilke’s German, from the eighth letter. Stephen Mitchell’s 1984 English gives the middle sentence as the line everybody quotes; M. D. Herter Norton’s earlier English gives it as “perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.”
The German original sits in the eighth letter, headed Borgeby gård, Flädie, Schweden, am 12. August 1904: “vielleicht sind alle Drachen unseres Lebens Prinzessinnen, die nur darauf warten, uns einmal schön und mutig zu sehen.”Read the letter ↗
The book itself is posthumous: Kappus sent the letters to Rilke’s daughter in 1929 and they appeared that year from Insel-Verlag in Leipzig, as number 406 of the Insel-Bücherei. Publication history ↗
M. D. Herter Norton’s English translates the passage “perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave” — close in sense, nothing like the wording that circulates. Norton’s full text ↗
A full-text search of scanned books places the exact string “act, just once, with beauty and courage” in the Random House 1984, Vintage 1986 and Modern Library 2001 printings of the letters — all Stephen Mitchell’s translation. The 1984 edition ↗
Rilke’s German original was first published in 1929 and is old enough to be public domain in the United States. The exact English sentence shown here is not: it is Stephen Mitchell’s translation, first published by Random House in 1984, and that translation remains 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
What gets lost when it travels
This is one of the rare famous quotes that survives checking. The attribution is right; what goes wrong is the wording, because Rilke wrote in German and the sentence people post is a particular translator’s English.
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The famous English wordingStephen Mitchell, uncredited Translation
“Act, just once, with beauty and courage” is Mitchell’s phrasing, published in his translation of the letters by Random House in 1984 and reissued by Vintage and the Modern Library. Rilke’s German is “uns einmal schön und mutig zu sehen” — literally, to see us beautiful and brave, just once. Quoting the English as Rilke’s own words drops the translator who made them. The 1984 Random House edition ↗
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A rival English versionM. D. Herter Norton’s translation Variant
The older Norton translation renders the same sentence “perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave” — of our lives, not in, and no “act, just once.” Hybrid versions mixing the two circulate widely. Norton’s text ↗
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The source line“Rilke” with nothing after it Unsourced
Most reposts give no work at all, and some file it under Rilke’s poetry. It is prose, from a letter: the eighth of ten replies to Franz Xaver Kappus, written at Borgeby gård in Sweden on 12 August 1904. Dates of all ten letters ↗
✓Rilke really wrote it — in German, to a young officer cadet, on 12 August 1904 ↗. The English you have seen belongs to his translator.
Context
Why he wrote it
Kappus had written to Rilke about a run of sadnesses he could not shake. Rilke’s reply — the eighth letter, written from a Swedish country house in August 1904 — is an argument that the frightening things in a life are not intruders but arrivals: that sadness is the moment something new enters us, and that what we call destiny “goes forth from within people, not from without into them.”
The dragons sentence is the turn of that argument. Rilke reaches for the oldest fairy tales, the ones in which the monster changes shape at the last second, and offers them not as consolation but as instruction: the terrible thing may be waiting on us, not the other way round. He follows it immediately with a line about everything frightening being, at bottom, something helpless that wants our help.
Rilke is not saying the dragons are harmless. He is saying they are waiting to see what you do.
How the letters reached print
Rilke died in December 1926. In 1929 Kappus sent the letters to Rilke’s daughter Ruth, and she and Rilke’s widow Clara Westhoff published the ten replies with a preface by Kappus, as number 406 of the Insel-Bücherei.
The original manuscripts of Rilke’s letters were auctioned off by Kappus in 1953 and their present whereabouts are not known; Kappus’s own letters survive in the Rilke archive at Gernsbach.
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1875–1926 · Austrian poet & novelist, writing in German and French
Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and died in Switzerland in 1926, and is one of the most widely read poets of the German language — author of the Duino Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Between 1903 and 1908 he answered ten letters from Franz Xaver Kappus, a teenage officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy who had asked whether his poems were any good. Rilke mostly declined to judge the poems and wrote instead about solitude, patience and the uses of difficulty — letters that Kappus published in 1929, three years after Rilke’s death, and which became Rilke’s most-read book.
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Primary source
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1984), eighth letter, Borgeby gård, Flädie, Sweden, 12 August 1904. German original first published as Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1929).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/perhaps-all-the-dragons-in-our-lives-are-princesses-who-are/