You say that love is nonsense.... I tell you it is no such thing.
For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart,
never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's
nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant,
but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator,
but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make laugh.
Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy,
or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other,
and both together make up one whole.
When love beckons to you follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions
May wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
As the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you
so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth
So is he for your pruning.
The Prophet by Gibran Khalil Gibran
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions
May wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
As the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you
so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth
So is he for your pruning.
The Prophet by Gibran Khalil Gibran
Love, with very young people, is a heartless business.
We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk;
it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the
individuality of our wine..
Love must not touch the marrow of the soul.
Our affections must be breakable chains that we
can cast them off or tighten them.
Our affections must be breakable chains that we
can cast them off or tighten them.
Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists...
When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the
other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in
two volumes of which the first has been lost.
That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness
in absence
A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species
of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled,
but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.
We conceal it from ourselves in vain--we must always love something..
In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is
secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly
live for a moment without it.
Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse;
it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness
which afflicts most men and women throughout
the greater part of their lives.
Love has features which pierce all hearts, he wears a bandage
which conceals the faults of those beloved. He has wings,
he comes quickly and flies away the same.
No matter what you've done for yourself or for humanity,
if you can't look back on having given love and attention to
your own family, what have you really accomplished?
