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Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.

— 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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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.