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If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.

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

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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)

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

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)

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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.