“I live my life in circles that grow wide and endlessly unroll.”
When life is opening up: growth, a new chapter.
This line comes on
About this line
The Book of Hours is a cycle of prayer-poems in the voice of a monk, written after Rilke’s travels in Russia; this line comes from its second poem. The image is expansion, not loss — a life that grows outward rather than closing in, not toward a destination, simply onward.
Why we carry this line
A life that widens instead of narrows — I needed that picture. Not a straight line to somewhere, a spiral going out. And this quote comprises one of my favorite designs. True confessions: I own the shirt, phone case and tumbler.
The design
The rings never close. Each arc breaks off before it becomes a full circle, and the breaks don’t line up. The gaps are ma, the Japanese idea that the pause between things is part of the design. The uneven spacing is fukinsei, the Japanese idea of asymmetry: balance without symmetry. A life that keeps growing outward shouldn’t be drawn as a target.
That was a real problem to solve. Full rings wrapped around a tumbler read as a bullseye, because you only ever see part of a cup at once. The tumbler went through eighteen versions. Breaking the arcs fixed it, and the broken arcs became the design for everything.
On the tee and the phone case, the rings sweep in from one side and run past the edge. On the tumbler, they wrap around the quote. Turn the cup and more of the circle comes around.
What happened next
Rilke wrote the first part of The Book of Hours in under four weeks, from September 20 to October 14, 1899, in Berlin. He was 23.
He dedicated the book to Lou Andreas-Salomé, the writer he had traveled through Russia with.
It took more than five years to reach print. The Book of Hours came out in April 1905.
Documented source
Every quote here is traced to a documented source. How we verify →