Echoes

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about but few have seen.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

Not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love.

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Love is like a fever; it comes and goes quite independently of the will.

Friendship and domestic happiness are continually praised; yet how little is there of either in the world, because it requires more cultivation of mind to keep awake affection, even in our own hearts, than the common run of people suppose. Besides, few like to be seen as they really are; and a degree of simplicity, and of undisguised confidence, which, to uninterested observers, would almost border on weakness, is the charm, nay the essence of love or friendship, all the bewitching graces of childhood again appearing.

True glory takes root and spreads; all pretenses quickly fall like flowers, and nothing feigned can last.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit, and the muse; Nothing refuse.

If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.

It is himself he is approaching, no other; and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style — all mannerisms, tricks, adornments.

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.

There is not love of life without despair about life.

Love is not consolation, it is light.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself.

One dies twice: to cease to live is nothing, but to cease to love and to be loved is an insupportable death.

My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me to love what the people abhor and to show good will toward the one they hate. It showed me that Love is a property not of the lover but of the beloved. Before my Soul taught me, Love was for me a delicate thread stretched between two adjacent pegs, but now it has been transformed into a halo; its first is its last, and its last is its first. It encompasses every being, slowly expanding to embrace all that ever will be.

So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril, and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off, reality remains.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

What does your conscience say? — You should become who you are.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.