Love is..

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet..

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure 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."

"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!"

"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."

"[...] 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 in whose relationships and contact no one moment resembles another."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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