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- For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
- But now that so much is changing, is it not up to us to change ourselves? Could we not develop ourselves a little, and slowly take upon ourselves our share of work in love, little by little?
- To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.
- 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 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.
- Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
- A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.
- All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling.
- This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
- Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
- Above all, marriage is a new task and a new seriousness, a new challenge to and questioning of the strength and generosity of each partner and a great new danger for both... A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow.
oct 17 2008 ∞
jun 30 2009 +
jun 30 2009 +