# Quote — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

> Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.

- Author: [Rainer Maria Rilke](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke.md)
- Book: [Letters to a Young Poet](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke#Letters_to_a_Young_Poet_(1934)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/physical-pleasure-is-a-sensual

## More from this book

> Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/be-patient-toward.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/love-is-at-first.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/young-people-it-is-obvious.md)