Quotes About Love

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable.

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.

The essence of love lies not in communion, but in the fact that each partner forces the other to become something, something infinitely great, the extreme limit of his strength.

If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.

It is true that many young people who do not love rightly, who simply surrender themselves and leave no room for aloneness, experience the depressing feeling of failure.

Du, dem ich's nicht sage, daß ich bei Nacht weinend liege, dessen Wesen mich müde macht wie eine Wiege. Du, der mir nicht sagt, wenn er wacht meinetwillen: wie, wenn wir diese Pracht ohne zu stillen in uns ertrügen? Sieh Dir die Liebenden an, wenn erst das Bekennen begann, wie bald sie lügen.

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured: as the arrow endures the string, collecting itself to be more than itself as it shoots?

Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are.

What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.

Have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people. Rilke, Rainer Maria (1993-09-17). Letters to a Young Poet (p. 22). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Among people, particularly those I love, I so easily get talking and give out everything possible in conversation, so that it is not available for my work. It is a stupid piece of clumsiness that I am so wanting in the gift of sociability, the talent for easy but at the same time recreative conversations, in which one does not exert and expend onesel

To Lou: I want to see the world through you; for then I shall not be seeing the world but only you, you you! I have never seen you without thinking that I should like to pray to you. I have never heard you without thinking that I should like to believe in you. I have never longed for you without thinking that I should like to suffer for you. I have never desired you without thinking that I should be allowed to kneel before you.

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. Death stands before eternity and says YES.

Have patience with everything unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves. It is possible to live and not know.

En une seule fleur Enchantée de cet artifice, ton abondance l'avait osé. Tu étais assez riche, pour devenir cent fois toi-même en une seule fleur; c'est l'état de celui qui aime Mais tu n'as pas pensé ailleurs.

Love at first has nothing to do with unfolding, abandon and uniting with another person (for what would be the sense in a union of what is unrefined and unfinished, still second order?); for the individual it is a grand opportunity to mature, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for another's sake; it is a great immoderate demand made upon the self, something that singles him out and summons him to vast designs.

How he loved and yet wished to leave you: always both, at once.

To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil.

Préfères-tu, rose, être l'ardente compagne de nos transports présents? Est-ce les souvenir qui davantage te gagne lorsqu'un bonheur se reprend? Tant de fois je t'ai vue, heureuse et sèche, - chaque pétale un linceul - dans un coffret odorant, à côté d'une mèche, ou dans un livre aimé qu'on relira seul.