“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.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke , book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: 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. But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence — then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.

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Rainer Maria Rilke 176

Austrian poet and writer 1875–1926

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