People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it. To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

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 the…

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.

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 …

He can never come to believe that anyone will ever help him out, ever. If he once thinks there's an easy way out, he's wrecked.

If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most al…

Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as h…