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Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.

— Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

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Love

More quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them.

Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990)

I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.

Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.

Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

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Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Bertrand Russell Marriage and Morals (1929)

Not for the body, but for the heart; companion and company are needed.

Sanu Sharma

Love seldom haunts the breast where learning lies,
And Venus sets ere Mercury can rise.

Alexander Pope

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Rainer Maria Rilke (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.