For The Love Of Wisdom

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Why, then, have to be human?

Oh not because happiness exists,

Nor out of curiosity...

But because being here

means so much;

because everything here,

vanishing so quickly,

seems to need us,

and strangely keeps 

calling to us...

To have been here once,

completely,

even if only once,

to have been at one

with the earth—

This is beyond undoing.