One of the best scenes Disney ever animated.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
Kahlil Gibran
Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.
Alain de Botton on “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person”
Often, we get crushes on others not because we truly love and understand them, but to distract ourselves from our suffering.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Bedtime boogie, a necessity for every nighttime routine.
helensweetstory-blog reblogged
“I think that [Mulder and Scully’s] relationship is defined not by what’s being said, but by what’s being withheld. But it’s absolutely plain that they love each other — in their own way. It’s the best kind of love. It’s unconditional. It’s not based on a physical attraction, but on a shared passion for life and for their quest. These are romantic heroes, romantic heroes in the literary tradition." — Chris Carter
If empiricism is barren and incomplete, while impressionistic guesswork leads anywhere and everywhere, what hope can there be of arriving at a workable understanding of the human heart? In the words of Vladimir Nabokov, there can be no science without fancy and no art without facts. Love emanates from the brain; the brain is physical, and thus as fit a subject for scientific discourse as cucumbers or chemistry. But love unavoidably partakes of the personal and the subjective, and so we cannot place it in the killing jar and pin its wings to cardboard as a lepidopterist might a prismatic butterfly. In spite of what science teaches us, only a delicate admixture of evidence and intuition can yield the truest view of the emotional mind. To slip between the twin dangers of empty reductionism and baseless credulity, one must balance a respect for proof with a fondness for the unproven and the unprovable. Common sense must combine in equal measure imaginative flight and an aversion to orthodoxy.
Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love
Amelia Earhart agrees to marry her publisher George Putnam after six failed proposals.
Every fall into love involves [to adapt Oscar Wilde] the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping that we will not find in the other what we know is in ourselves – all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise and brute stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one, and decide that everything that lies within it will somehow be free of our faults and hence lovable. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through union with the beloved, hope somehow to maintain [against evidence of all self-knowledge] a precarious faith in the species.
Alain de Botton
Not that I loved Caesar less, but
that I loved Rome more. Had you
rather Caesar were living and die
all slaves, than that Caesar were
dead to live all freemen? As Caesar
loved me, I weep for him; as he was
fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he
was valiant, I honor him; but as he
was ambitious, I slew him.
Julius Caesar, Act 3: Scene 2