Interpersonal Relationships

"Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire. (IV)"

"But nothing that can be said can begin to take away the anguish and the pain of these moments. Grief is the price we pay for love."

"The hutzpah of our love is pleasing to you, O Lord, just as it pleased you that we should steal from your bounty."

"Even as the Sun doth not wait for prayers and incantations to rise, but shines forth and is welcomed by all: so thou also wait not for clapping of hands and shouts and praise to do thy duty; nay, do good of thine own accord, and thou wilt be loved like the Sun."

"Let no man think that he is loved by any who loveth none."

"Both the preservation of the species and selfish sexual pleasure reduce the partner to a mere tool and destroy his [or her] dignity. Love alone bestows a spiritual meaning upon marriage, and justifies it by elevating it to perceive the countenance of the beloved in God."

"L’expérience nous montre qu’aimer ce n’est point nous regarder l’un l’autre mais regarder ensemble dans la même direction. (Page 203)"

"Their mouths speak of love, but their hearts are greedy for unjust gain."

"Love is the gift that brings us nearer Heaven Than any other gift the world can hold, And perfect Love is nearest perfect bliss."

"Old sundial, you stand here for Time: For Love, the vine that round your base Its tendrils twines, and dares to climb And lay one flower-capped spray in grace Without the asking on your cold Unsmiling and unfrowning face."

"Upon your shattered ruins where This vine will flourish still, as rare, As fresh, as fragrant as of old. Love will not crumble."

"Dropt tears have hastened your decay And brought you one step nigher death; And you have heard, unthrilled, unmoved, The music of Love's golden breath And seen the light in eyes that loved. You think you hold the core and kernel Of all the world beneath your crust, Old dial? But when you lie in dust, This vine will bloom, strong, green, and proved. Love is eternal."

"Every man's life (and … every woman's life), awaits the hour of blossoming that makes it immortal … love is a divinity above all accidents, and guards his own with extraordinary obstinacy."

"No love-story has ever been told twice. I never heard any tale of lovers that did not seem to me as new as the world on its first morning."

"I will fight for you, yes, and you will fight for me. And if you have sacrificed joy and courage and beauty and wisdom for my sake, I will give them all to you again; and yet you must also give them to me, for they are things in which without you I am wanting. But together we can make them."

"'In love there are no penalties and no payments, and what is given is indistinguishable from what is received.' And he bent his head and kissed her long and deeply, and in that kiss neither knew themselves, or even each other, but something beyond all consciousness that was both of them."

"He loved her, both for her fault and her redemption of it, more than he had ever thought that he could love her; for he had believed that in their kiss love had reached its uttermost. But love has no uttermost, as the stars have no number and the sea no rest."

"Women are so strangely constructed that they have in them darkness as well as light, though it be but a little curtain hung across the sun. And love is the hand that takes the curtain down, a stronger hand than fear, which hung it up. For all the ill that is in us comes from fear, and all the good from love."

"Prometheus, I have no Titan's might, Yet I, too, must each dusk renew my heart, For daytime's vulture talons tear apart The tender alcoves built by love at night."

"One thing is sure, O comrades, that the love That fights to keep us rooted in the earth, But also urges us to dare the stars, This irresistible, this ancient power Wedged in the soul, unshakable, is the light That burns our roots and leaves us free for Space."

"The way is open, comrades, free as Space Alone is free. The only gold is love, A coin that we have minted from the light Of others who have cared for us on Earth And who have deposited in us the power That nerves our nerves to seize the burning stars."

"Yes, we hope to seed a new, rich earth. We hope to breed a race of men whose power Dwells in hearts as open as all Space Itself, who ask for nothing but the light That rinses the heart of hate so that the stars Above will be below when man has Love."

"God, Whose hand holds stars, as we lump earth In our fingers, give us power, give us light To hold all love within our breast's small space."

"They say love dies between two people. That's wrong. It doesn't die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you are not good enough, worthy enough. It doesn't die; you're the one that dies."

"The whole human race is just a family scattered across the face of the whole earth. All peoples are brothers, and must love each other as such."

"When you come to be sensibly touched, the scales will fall from your eyes; and by the penetrating eyes of love you will discern that which your other eyes will never see."

""Love" may enter the vocabulary with increasing frequency; for all its ambiguity, its connotations of sentimentality, no word in English better approximates the new sense of caring and connectedness."

"Integrative power recognizes that men as well as women have been the victims of history and narrowly defined roles.... It is a caring form of power—power aligned with love. Work for social justice, for peace, for overcoming poverty and alienation, for building a more truly humanizing future... is not even possible without a combination of love and power. Love itself is not possible without power or self-assertion. And power without love is easily reduced to manipulation and exploitation."

"Those who love us may well push us when we're ready to fly. The too-soft teacher reinforces the learner's natural wish to retreat and stay safe, never venturing out for new knowledge, never risking. The teacher must know when to let the learner struggle, realizing that "help" or comfort, even when asked, can interrupt a transformation. This is the same good sense that knows the swimmer must let go, the bicyclist must achieve a new, internal equilibrium. Even in the name of love or sympathy, we must not be spared our learnings."

"No real solution can come until both men and women truly see the nature of the problem, which lives in each of us . . . . Seeing the patterns changes you. As long as men and women are hooked into romance, they can never meet each other totally. If we are to open opportunities to meet human beings, we must leave the whole context of conquest. It takes equals to create the possibility of mature love."

"Studies of infants in institutions have shown that the development of normal intelligence requires human interaction. Without love, without input and response from the world, we can make no sense of the world. Retardation is the result for babies who are fed but not played with, safe but not spoken to. An atmosphere of trust, love, and humor can nourish extraordinary human capacity."

"Frederick Perls, the famous psychologist, once said that dissociation—the split between emotions and conscious thinking—begins with a parent's conditional love. Because many adults were betrayed as children—not rewarded for being themselves, always urged to "do better" however hard they tried—they find it difficult to trust that they are loved. The chain is perpetuated if they become parents because they may find it hard to accept their own children unconditionally. Not until we have discovered the extent of our own programmed fears can we forgive the imperfections and weaknesses of others. When we have touched the healthy center in ourselves, we know it exists in others, whatever their outward behavior. Consciousness enables us to care about them."

"Love and fraternity, once part of an ideal, have become crucial to our survival. Jesus enjoined his followers to love one another; Teilhard added, "or you perish." Without human affection, we become sick, frightened, hostile. Lovelessness is a broken circuit, loss of order. The worldwide quest for community typified by the networks of the Aquarian Conspiracy is an attempt to boost that attenuated power. To cohere. To kindle wider consciousness. When man reclaims this energy source, the sublimation of spiritual-sensual love, Teilhard once said, "for the second time he will have discovered fire.""

"Tell your son to stop trying to fill your head with science — for to fill your heart with love is enough!"

"Just one step at a time And closer to destiny I knew at a glance There'd always be a chance for me With someone I could live for Nowhere I would rather be. Is your love strong enough Like a rock in the sea? Am I asking too much? Is your love strong enough?"

"Love divides an existence which is in itself dead, as it were into a two-fold being, holding it up before its own contemplation, — and thereby makes it an Ego or Self, which beholds and is cognizant of itself; and in this personality lies the root of all Life. Love again reunites and intimately binds together this divided personality, which, without Love, would regard itself coldly and without interest. This latter unity, within a duality which is not thereby destroyed but eternally remains subsistent, is Life itself; as every one who strictly considers these ideas and combines them together must at once distinctly perceive."

"Love has never been understood, though it may have been fully experienced, and that experience communicated."

"Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture."

"Contrary to popular opinion, love is not altruistic. [...] Love is the height of selfishness: the self attempts to enrich itself through the absorption of another being. Love is being psychically wide-open to another. It is a situation of total emotional vulnerability. Therefore it must be not only the incorporation of the other, but an exchange of selves. Anything short of a mutual exchange will hurt one or the other party. There is nothing inherently destructive about this process. A little healthy selfishness would be a refreshing change. Love between two equals would be an enrichment, each enlarging himself through the other: instead of being one, locked in the cell of himself with only his own experience and view, he could participate in the existence of another – an extra window on the world. This accounts for the bliss that successful lovers experience: lovers are temporarily freed from the burden of isolation that every individual bears."

"Bliss in love is seldom the case: for every successful contemporary love experience, for every short period of enrichment, there are ten destructive love experiences, post-love ‘downs’ of much longer duration – often resulting in the destruction of the individual, or at least an emotional cynicism that makes it difficult or impossible ever to love again."

"Being unable to love is hell."

"To live without love in the end proves intolerable to men just as it does to women."

"At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion."

"All the time in the world—his life and hers. But for an instant as he kissed her he knew that though he search through eternity he could never recapture those lost April hours. He might press her close now till the muscles knotted on his arms—she was something desirable and rare that he had fought for and made his own—but never again an intangible whisper in the dusk, or on the breeze of night. . . . Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice. THE END"

"All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you.'"

"I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything."

"I believe that a woman should love a man for what he is, not for what she wants him to be."

"I wish I could take what I'm feeling right now and put it in the water system so everybody could drink it and we would all love each other."

"I love love I love being in love I don't care what it does to me"

"Masood, a young lady has fallen in love with me—at least so I judge from her letters. Awkward is it not—awkward and surprising. You would be flattered and twirl your moustache, but I am merely uncomfortable. I wish she would stop, as she is very nice, and I enjoyed being friends. What an ill constructed world this is! Love is always being given where it is not required."