James D. Bryden:Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Love does not die easily. It is a living thing. It thrives in the face of all of life's hazards, save one -- neglect.
Goethe:To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.
Oscar Hammerstein, II:Do you love me because I'm beautiful,
or am I am beautiful because you love me?
What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork. (yes! yes! no thesis... just love! professor... give me a first class honours... out of love...)
Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...
You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "maybe we should just be friends" or "how very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
in Sandman: The Kindly Ones by Neil Gaiman
Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
Danilo Dolci:It's important to know that words don't move mountains. Work, exacting work moves mountains.
If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.
Thomas Alva Edison:Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.(have I told you? a girl in my class has finished her thesis already... super genius or super hardworking? 2 and a half months ahead of schedule.. the rest of us are stressed...)
Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].
Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.
This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adaptedCharles Augustin Sainte-Beuve:
Tell me who admires and loves you,
And I will tell you who you are.
Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are. (suspiciously similar.. who said what first?)
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods
Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.