Love - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

 

 

 

 

love

 

 

"Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself in another's sake."

-Letters to a Young Poet

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"Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms."

-The Duino Elegies: The Third Elegy

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"Having promised one another distance, hunting, and home, don't lovers always cross eachothers boundaries?"

-The Duino Elegies: The Fourth Elegy

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"There is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another. That is work, day labor, day labor, God knows there is no other word for it."

-Letters to a Young Poet

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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."

-Letters to a Young Poet

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"Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasuure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work."

-Letters to a Young Poet

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"So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!"

-Letters to a Young Poet

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"To speak of love is to speak of hardness."

-Rilke and Benvenuta: an Intimate Correspondence

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"May I be granted that, in your hands, the habit of looking on love as a thing to accomplish will leave, like an old pain- and that, slowly raising my eyes to look at you, I would no longer know where it had hurt- or where it had been."

-Rilke and Benvenuta: an Intimate Correspondence

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"To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure."

-Rilke and Benvenuta: an Intimate Correspondence

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"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

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"...human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most changeable of all, rising and falling, from minute to minute, and lovers are those whose relationships and contact no one moment resembles another."

-Letters to a Young Poet