Whatever happens

whatever happens
to the world around
show me your purpose
show me your source

even if the world
is Godless and in chaos
show me your anchor
show me your love

if there is hunger
if there is famine
show me your harvest
show me your resource

if life is bitter
everywhere snakes everywhere poison
show me your garden
show me your meadow

if the sun and the moon fall
if darkness rules the world
show me your light
show me your flame

if I have no mouth
or tongue to utter
words of your secrets
show me your fountain

i'll keep silence
How can i express
your life when mine
still is untold

Rumi - Poems

The secret of love

I:302
When you love very little, you are sure to be loved.

La Rochefoucauld - Maxims

Women's love

V:277
Women often think they are in love though they are not. The business of an intrigue, the excitement produced by a love affair, a natural predilection for the pleasure of being loved, and the difficulty of refusing, convince them that they are being passionate when they are merely being flirtatious.

La Rochefoucauld - Maxims

Constancy in love

V:175
Constancy in love is a perpetual inconstancy, which makes our hearts fasten in succession in all the qualities of the person we love, preferring now one, now another - so that such constancy is merely inconstancy contained in and confined to a single object

V:176
There are two kinds of constancy in love. One is due to the fact that we are continually finding new things to love in the person we love; the other is due to the fact that we make it a point of honor to be constant.

La Rochefoucauld - Maxims

Conditions of love

V:75
Love, like fire, is sustained only by constant motion, and it ceases to exist when it ceases to hope or fear.

La Rochefoucauld - Maxims

Freudian insights

Nothing is more certain than that a devout girl who does the work of the flesh with her lover feels a hundred times more pleasure than a girl who is without prejudices. This truth is too much in the nature of things for me to think it necessary to prove it to my reader.

Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (11, 3)

In Russia love is expressed by beatings

Strange necessity for a master in Russia; when the occasion arises, he has to beat his servant! Words have no effect; nothing but stirrup leathers produce one. The servant, whose soul is only that of a slave, reflects after the beating, and says: 'My master has not dismissed me, he would not have beaten me if he did not love me, so I ought to be attached to him. '

Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (10, 6)

There is no friendship between a man and a woman

I forgot that is impossible to feel nothing but friendship for a woman whom one thinks pretty, whom one sees constantly, and whom one suspects of being in love. Friendship at its apogee becomes love, and, relieving itself by the same sweet mechanism which love needs to make itself happy, it rejoices to have become stronger after the fond act. A Platonist who maintains that one can be merely the friend of a pleasing young woman with whom one lives is a visionary.

Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (6, 7)

Reason is impaired by passions

This does the poor philosopher reason when he undertakes to reason at moments when a tumultuous passion leads the divine faculties of his soul astray. To reason rightly one must be neither in love nor in anger; for those two passions reduce as to the level of animals; and unfortunately we are never so much inclined to reason as when we are agitated by one or the other of them.

Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (2, 1)

Loving God even as a sinner

Belief in Eternal Providence on the part of most of those who live by practices forbidden by laws or religion is neither absurd nor feigned nor the fruit of hypocrisy; it is true, real, and, such as it is, pious, for its source is unimpeachable. Whatever ways it takes, it is always Providence which acts, and those who worship it regardless of everything else can only be good souls though guilty of sinning.

Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (2, 1)

LOVE

I have absolutely no other passion but love to keep me going. What covetousness, ambition, quarrels and lawsuits do for men who, like me, have no other allotted task, love would do more suitably: it would restore me to vigilance, sober behaviour, graceful manners and care about my person; love would give new strength to my features so that the distortions of old age, pitiful and misshapen, should not come and disfigure them; it would bring me back to wise and healthy endeavours by which I could make myself better esteemed and better loved, banishing from my mind all sense of hopefulness about itself and about its application, while bringing it to know itself again: it would divert me away from a thousand painful thoughts, from a thousand melancholy sorrows which idleness burdens us with old age, as does the poor state of our health; it would, at least in dream, restore some heat to my blood - this blood of mine which Nature is forsaking; it would lift up my chin and unbuckle my sinews as well as the vigour and exhilaration of the soul for this poor fellow who is on his way out, rushing toward disintegration.

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On some lines of Virgil (III, 5)

The procreation and the extinction

No man likes to be in on a birth: all men rush to be in on a death. To unmake a human being we choose an open field in broad daylight: to make one, we hide away in a dark little hollow. When making one we must hide and blush: but glory lies in unmaking one, and it produces other virtues. One act is unwholesome: the other, an act of grace, (...)

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On some lines of Virgil (III, 5)

How to cure grief and sorrow

Once upon a time I was touched by a grief, powerful on account of my complection and as justified as it was powerful. I might well have died from it if I had merely trusted to my own strength. I needed a mind-departing distraction to divert it; so by art and effort I made myself fall in love, helped in that by my youth. Love comforted me and took me away from the illness brought on by that loving-friendship. The same applies everywhere: some painful ideea gets hold of me ; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it. If I cannot substitute an opposite one for it, I can at least find a different one. Change always solace it, dissolves it and dispels it. If I cannot fight it, I flee it ; and by my flight I made a diversion and use craft ; by changing place, occupation and company I escape from it into the crowd of other pastimes and cogitations, in which it loses all track of me and cannot find me.

Michel de Montaigne - Complete Essays, On diversion (III, 4)

Pragmatism vs. sentiment

PRINCESS:

And out of question so it is sometimes:
Glory grows guilty of detested crimes,
When, for fame's sake, for praise, an outward part,
We bend to that the working of the heart;

William Shakespeare - Love's Labour's Lost (4.1)

Love is the ultimate Truth

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into songs by so many poets, proclaim as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemporary of an infinite glory."
...
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

Viktor E. Frankl - Man's search for Meaning

Materialistic love

FORD: [...]
Love like a shadow flies, when substance Love pursues,
Pursuing that that flies, and flying what pursues.

[ NOTE: Like a shadow, love pursues a physical object (substance)/ person/money that flees, and flees a physical object/person/money that pursues.]

William Shakespeare - The merry wives of Windsor (2.2.185-186)

No one died for love. Ever.

ROSALIND: Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

William Shakespeare - As you like it

Love is merely a madness

Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

William Shakespeare - As you like it (III,2)

Don't mix friendship with love

CLAUDIO:

Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love.
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues,
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent, for beauty is a witch
Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.

William Shakespeare - Much ado about nothing

Men's 'love oaths' are not to be trusted

BEATRICE: [...] I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.

William Shakespeare - Much ado about nothing (I.1)