Rainer Maria Rilke: Quotes about love

Rainer Maria Rilke was Austrian poet and writer. Explore interesting quotes on love.
Rainer Maria Rilke: 352 quotes229 likes

“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 book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time. Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit?”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Six (23 December 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“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 world, to become world for himself for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Young people -it is obvious -cannot achieve such a relationship, but they can, if they understand their life properly, grow up slowly to such happiness and prepare themselves for it. They must not forget, when they love, that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love- must learn love, and that like all learning wants peace, patience, and composure.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

On young couples who have not yet matured enough to recognize and respect each other's solitude
Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Through such impressions one gathers oneself, wins oneself back from the exacting multiplicity, which speaks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one slowly learns to recognize the very few Things in which something eternal endures that one can love and something solitary that one can gently take part in.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

About Rome.
Letter Five (29 October 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)