When you feel sad, you are participating in a venerable experience, to which I, this monument, am dedicated. Your sense of loss and disappointment, of frustrated hopes and grief at your own inadequacy, elevate you to serious company. Do not ignore of throw away your grief.
Nature’s kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don’t get as scared as we should.
I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key – a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they’ve been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place. The.
There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled or as ‘normal’, as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile and multiple – all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.
We charm by coincidence rather than design.
Though from a position of unrequited love they long to see their love returned, Marxists unconsciously prefer that their dreams remain in the realm of fantasy. Why should others think any better of them than they of themselves? Only so long as the loved one believes the Marxist to be more or less nothing, can the Marxist continue to believe the loved one to be more or less everything.
A marriage doesn’t begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soulmate. Rabih.
Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again, but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time; not when they have every opportunity to run away, but when they have exchanged solemn vows promising to hold us, and be held captive by us, for life. Our.
In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.
Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing and shameful parts of us. That someone else gets who we are and both sympathizes with and forgives us for what they see underpins our whole capacity to trust and to give. Love is a dividend of gratitude for our lover’s insight into our own confused and troubled psyche.
Romanticism is a philosophy of intuitive agreement. In real love, there is no need tiresomely to articulate or spell things out. When two people belong together, there is simply – at long last – a wondrous reciprocal feeling that both parties see the world in precisely the same way.
A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island. It.
We should forever forswear the masochistic process wherein we seek another’s approval before we have even asked ourselves whether that person’s views deserve to be listened to.
We can see beauty well enough just by opening our eyes, but how long this beauty will survive in memory depends on how intentionally we have apprehended it.
A definition of beauty that more accurately summed up my feelings for Chloe was delivered by Stendhal. “Beauty is the promise of happiness,” he wrote, pointing to the way Chloe’s face alluded to qualities I identified with a good life: there was humor in her nose, her freckles spoke of innocence, and her teeth suggested a casual, cheeky disregard for convention.
We learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating, quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.
Look not just at the Roman campagna, the pageantry of Venice, and the proud expression of Charles I astride his horse, but also have a look at the bowl on the sideboard, the dead fish in your kitchen, and the crusty bread loaves in the hall.
With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.
Even if our loved ones have assured us that they’ll be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special.