Love and other human conditions: How does it affect you?
Firmness looks like strength, but it's not strength. Contemplation looks like intelligence, but it's not intelligence. Kindness looks like love, but it's not love.
Time, like a dog, buries the authentic self. For the longest time, we're hidden beings. Eventually, our original selves, like splinters deep beneath the skin, rise to the surface where, if we're lucky, love's tweezers pluck us out.
We marry a person we think we look like or want to look like. We fall in love with other people when we see some version of ourselves in them. Disappointment in love is most often the discovery that our romantic partner is less ourselves than we thought.
Caretaking is not to be confused with loving. Caretaking is what we do with infants or the elderly, those who cannot or can no longer take care of themselves. A lover is not a parent, nor a nurse.
There aren't kinds of passion; there's just passion
The Renaissance believed passion was a horse on which our intellect rode. We rein in our passions lest they gallop away with us and throw us from the saddle, dashing us in the fall. Perhaps our passions are not so much horses as waves-rising and falling within us. We can jump them, or we can dive under and let them wash harmlessly over us. If we're not looking, they can knock us down. If they're large enough, if they're tidal passions or tsunami emotions, if they're relentless enough and batter us in quick barrage, they may overwhelm us and we may drown.
People who hate themselves have always hated themselves. Our capacity for happiness is established early on.
Happiness is a function of belief. Belief is the imaginary embodied in mind. Happiness sleeps with the imagination.
The plural of happiness is marriage
What is marriage? Seeing the other person honestly and continuously; never losing sight of the person we fell in love with; not being fooled by the disguises of mood, body, and spirit; not being hoodwinked by the vicissitudes of fortune, time, and circumstance; to see through the flesh of change to the bone of being
Intimacy cannot be created by an avalanche of information. It's more like a precariously constructed house of toothpicks or cards. It builds on a fragile center.
A man falls headfirst from a horse, injures his spinal column and is paralyzed. A man falls off his passions onto his intellect and for the rest of his life is an emotional cripple. The first is Christopher Reeve. The second is Goethe.
A calloused spouse: a lost soul, a lost cause, a soul impervious to emotional caress
If you want to know how tornadoes are formed, study marriage
Exchange of monologue is not conversation but queue of ego
Real conversation is a dance in which the partners do not move gracefully across the floor of silence but step continually on one another's toes
If you get married because you want someone to take care of you in your old age, you haven't married out of love but out of selfishness. Misery awaits you.
Our love of objects is not the same love as our love for another person. We need two distinct verbs to make clear the difference. A man who loves his wife as he loves his car or his lawn or his work does not love his wife.
Man is not born to be alone; he marries to be alone
Marriage: no deposit, no return
The little bricks of happiness are part of the cumulative house
