You learn to put your emotional luggage where it will do some good, instead of using it to shit on read more

You learn to put your emotional luggage where it will do some good, instead of using it to shit on other people, or blow up aeroplanes.

The art of love ... is largely the art of persistence.

The art of love ... is largely the art of persistence.

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do read more

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

The pursuit of truth will set you free; even if you never catch up with it.

The pursuit of truth will set you free; even if you never catch up with it.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with read more

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

There's a little truth in all jive, and a little jive in all truth.

There's a little truth in all jive, and a little jive in all truth.

What is passion? It is surely the becoming of a person. Are we not, for most of our lives, marking read more

What is passion? It is surely the becoming of a person. Are we not, for most of our lives, marking time? Most of our being is at rest, unlived. In passion, the body and the spirit seek expression outside of self. Passion is all that is other from self. Sex is only interesting when it releases passion. The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead and that soon, come what may, we will be wholly so.

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, read more

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.