Jimmy Winokur

Ideas and Quotations

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On Love   

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To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.

David Viscott

The first duty of love is to listen.

Paul Tillich
 

Nobody out there can love you the way you want to be loved.  Only you can do that.

John-Roger

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.

Diane Arbus

Only – but this is rare –
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When jaded with rush and glare,
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When in our world-deafened ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed –
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again;
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow.

Matthew Arnold, The Buried Life 

 

When he shall die
Take him and cut him out into stars
And he shall make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Wm. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 
quoted by Bobby Kennedy in memory of his slain brother, John.

The beloved is already in our being, as thirst and “otherness.”  
Being is eroticism.  Inspiration is that strange voice 
that takes man out of himself to be every thing that he is, 
everything that he desires; another body, another being.   
Beyond, outside of me, in the green and gold thicket, 
among the tremulous branches, 
sings the unknown.  
It calls to me.

Octavio Paz

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; 
it is the prerogative of the brave.

Mohandas K. Gandhi

The essence of being human, is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to 
commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes 
friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up 
by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

George Orwell, Reflections on Gandhi

Love is a choice --
not simply or necessarily a rational choice,
but rather a willingness to be present to others
 without pretense or guile.

Carter Heyward, Our Passion for Justice (1984)

 

Love a friend, a wife, something,
but one must love with
a lofty and serious intimate sympathy,
with strength, with intelligence
and one must always try
to know deeper and better and more."

Vincent Van Gogh

...Breaking up is hard to do.

Neal Sedaka & Howard Greenfield (1962)
Rock 'n' Roll, in a rare moment of  understatement, and in its  most accurate truth.

 

 

 

... I wonder why passion's always half impossibility
but lovers that we lose we never dare forget
we visit them in mourning in December and in May
in the graveyard of St. Mary's of Regret"

Susan Werner, St. Mary's of Regret
encountered on Carolyn Andre's great website
 

For those who may be hurting over lost love:
Don't cry because it is over... smile because it happened."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 

No more words. 
In the name of this place
we drink in with our breathing,
stay quiet like a flower.
So the nightbirds will start singing.

Jalaluddin Rumi

Most marriages recognize this paradox:
Passion destroys passion;
we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

 John Fowles  

    

The truth [is] that there is only one terminal dignity — love.
And the story of a love is not important —
what is important is that one is capable of love.
It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

Helen Hayes

  

 

Where love rules, there is no will to power;
and where power predominates, there love is lacking.
The one is the shadow of the other.

Carl Jung

A heart feels a heart.

Alicia's Grandma Paulie

 It is not love, but lack of love, which is blind.

Glenway Wescott
 

It is an ancient metaphysical law that says 
that we never leave any situation 
that causes us discomfort [or is a problem] 
until we learn to love it or at least 
to see love at work in it.

Quoted by Eleanor Futscher

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive...

Anais Nin
 

He moved his lips about her ears and neck
as though in thirsting search of an erogenous zone. 
A waste of time, he knew from experience. 
Erogenous zones were either everywhere or nowhere.

Joseph Heller

New lovers are nervous and tender,
yet smash everything-
for the heart is an organ of fire.

from The English Patient
 

Love is the music, sex is only the instrument.

Isabelle Allende
 

The sexual organs are the most sensitive organs of the human being.
They are not diplomats. They tell the truth.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Sex:
the pleasure is momentary,
the position ridiculous,
and the expense damnable.

Lord Chesterfield
 

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