Rilke Life in Circles Phone Case

A literary quote phone case featuring Rainer Maria Rilke's "I live my life in circles that grow wide and endlessly unroll..." from The Book of Hours, 1905 (tr. Jessie Lemont, 1918). Literary objects by Quoteiac.

Rainer Maria Rilke

“I live my life in circles that grow wide and endlessly unroll...”

Rilke wrote The Book of Hours in near-automatic sessions between 1899 and 1903 — poems he described as arriving whole, as if dictated from somewhere he couldn't name. The poem this line opens is not about expansion as progress. It is about the shape of a life that doesn't travel in a straight line toward mastery. The circles grow. They don't close. Every time you pick up this case, that's the first thing you read.

The Design

The warm burnished arcs sweeping from the upper right aren't decoration — they are the poem's argument made visual. Concentric curves radiating outward, left open, never completing. In the same way an enso is deliberately drawn without closing the loop, these arcs signal that the motion of the circle is the point — not arriving at its end. The quote sits inside this movement, surrounded by it on one side, open on the other. The matte black ground keeps everything receding so only the arcs and the words hold.

Read the full story behind this quote: Rainer Maria Rilke and the Life That Moves in Circles.

Also available: Life in Circles — Rilke Book of Hours T-Shirt — the same quote on cotton.

Also available: Life in Circles — Rilke Organic Edition T-Shirt — 100% organic cotton

About This Case

• Tough dual-layer construction — flexible TPU inner layer, hard polycarbonate outer shell
• Raised edges protect the screen and camera
• Induction charging compatible — works with most wireless devices
• Available for iPhone 11 through iPhone 17 Pro Max
• Care note: Keep away from liquids with high alcohol content and prolonged direct sunlight to preserve the design.

Who It’s For

The reader who marks the margins. The thinker who returns to the same question from a new angle and is not embarrassed by it. The one who understands that a life that spirals outward is not a life that has lost direction — it's a life in motion.

Carry the orbit.

Rainer Maria Rilke, in Plain English

• Lived: 1875–1926, born in Prague — wrote in German, one of the rare poets who survives translation
• The Book of Hours (1905) was completed in three separate bursts of writing; he described them as sessions of dictation, not composition
• Spent his adult life deliberately homeless — Russia, Paris, a castle on the Adriatic — convinced that stability would silence him
• The translation used here is Jessie Lemont's 1918 version — the first English translation of The Book of Hours, and the one in public domain