Love Inspires How can my Muse want subject to invent While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse Thine own sweet argument, too excellent For every vulgar paper to rehearse? O, give thyself the thanks if aught in me Worthy perusal stand against thy sight, For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee, When thou thyself dost give invention light? Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more […]
Read moreTag: Love
“The Cossacks” by Leo Tolstoy
Young Tolstoy in Love One must taste life once in all its natural beauty, must see and understand what I see every day before me–those eternally unapproachable snowy peaks, and a majestic woman in that primitive beauty in which the first woman must have come from her creator’s hands–and then it becomes clear who is living truly or falsely. Three months have passed since I first saw the Cossack girl. […]
Read more“The Art of Love” by Ovid
Twelve love tips from Roman gods and heroes 1. First and foremost, be confident that all women may be won. As the numberless ants come and go in lengthened train, when they are carrying their wonted food in the mouth that bears the grains; so rush the best-dressed women to the thronged spectacles. They come to see, and be seen. Romulus and his men swept the Sabine damsels off their […]
Read more
“Childhood, Boyhood, Youth” by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s Self-Portrait In this semiautobiographical trilogy, Tolstoy imagined a friendship between his boyhood-self, the narrator, and his young-adult self, Prince Dimitri Nechludoff, who is also the hero of hist last novel, Resurrection. Tolstoy was only in his 20s when he wrote the trilogy, but his self-portrait was stunningly accurate. In him there were two personalities, both of which I thought beautiful. One, which I loved devotedly, was kind, mild, forgiving, […]
Read more“Repetition” by Søren Kierkegaard
She is the boundary of his being Kierkegaard met Regine Olsen in Copenhagen in 1837, and, by all appearances, there was a deep attraction between the two. They were engaged in 1840, but Kierkegaard immediately broke off the engagement the following year. Regina married her old tutor in 1847, and the couple left Copenhagen for the Danish West Indies in March 1855. Kierkegaard died in November that same year, having […]
Read more“Ennead III: On Love” by Plotinus
On Love Love is a real substance (ὑπόστᾰσις, hypostasis) born of the activity of the Soul. It is a kind of intermediary between desiring and desired; the eye of the desiring which through its power gives to the lover the sight of the beloved; but Loves himself runs on ahead and before he gives the lover the power of sight, he fills himself with gazing, seeing before the lover but […]
Read moreBertrand Russell on Love
“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.” –Bertrand Russell “The Conquest of Happiness” Russell, when asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, whose Love he had refused to believe and accept, was quoted to have said, “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.” “For God so loved the world that He gave His only […]
Read more