“I love her and she loves me and together we hate each other with a wild hatred born of love.”
Edvard Munch, via Sunbeams (Page 103)
“God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his solitude more acutely.”
Paul Valéry, via Sunbeams (Page 99)
“The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It’s a perpetual wound.”
Maureen Duffy, via Sunbeams (Page 97)
“Love is when I am concerned with your relationship with your own life, rather than with your relationship to mine… There must be a commitment to each other’s well-being. Most people who say they have a commitment don’t; they have an attachment. Commitment means, ‘I am going to stick with you and support your experience of well-being.’ Attachment means, ‘I am stuck without you.'”
Stewart Emery, via Sunbeams (Page 86)
“Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. That is what makes a marriage last—more than passion or even sex.”
Simone Signoret, via Sunbeams (Page 73)
“To marry a woman with any success a man must have a total experience of her, he must come to see her and accept her in time as well as in space. Besides coming to love what she is now, he must also come to realize and love equally the baby and the child she once was, and the middle-aged woman and the old crone she will eventually become.”
James Keyes, Only Two Can Play This Game, via Sunbeams (Page 73)
“While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths, the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.”
M. Scott Peck, via Sunbeams (Page 72)
“Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.”
Sheldon Kopp, via Sunbeams (Page 61)
“To some extent, each of us marries to make up for his own deficiencies. As a child, no one can stand alone against his family and the community, and in all but the most extreme instances, he is in no position to leave and to set up a life elsewhere. In order to survive as children, we have all had to exaggerate those aspects of ourselves that pleased those on whom we depended, and to disown those attitudes and behaviors that were unacceptable to them. As a result, to varying degrees, we have each grown into disproportionate configurations of what we could be as human beings. What we lack, we seek out and then struggle against in those whom we select as mates. We marry the other because he (or she) is different from us, and then we complain, ‘Why can’t he (she) be more like me?'”
Sheldon Kopp, via Sunbeams (Page 61)
“You want to be loved because you do not love; but the moment you love, it is finished, you are no longer inquiring whether or not somebody loves you.”
J. Krishnamurit, via Sunbeams (Page 60)
“It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to feel forgotten.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 83)
Francois de La Rouchefoucauld Quote on Absence and How It’s The Ultimate Relationship Test
“Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.”
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Beyond the Quote (Day 411)
Without absence it’s hard to tell what’s a priority and what’s not. Because if there’s no absence, then there’s immersion and if we’re immersed in something, then that’s all we know—we have nothing to contrast it against. If we were only ever taught math, how might we know if we liked another subject better? If we only ever spent time with certain people, how could we know what it would be like to spend time with others? Contrast is what provides us with the opportunity to compare. Without it, we have only the option we have.
Read More »Francois de La Rouchefoucauld Quote on Absence and How It’s The Ultimate Relationship Test“Our relationships with people become the instantiations of negative attitudes to ourselves: I believe myself to be ugly; I behave in an ugly way; I then have relationships with others that confirm my belief. A self-perpetuating doctrine.”
Russell Brand, Recovery (Page 150)
50 Deep Love Quotes – And How Love Is More Than A Relationship
Excerpt: These deep love quotes aren’t for you to copy and paste and send to your lover—they’re for you to copy and paste onto the walls of your heart.
Read More »50 Deep Love Quotes – And How Love Is More Than A Relationship
Rumi Quote on Gifts and How Nothing Seems Right
“You have no idea how hard I have looked for a gift to bring you. Nothing seemed right. What’s the point of bringing gold to a gold mine, or water to the ocean. Everything I came up with was like taking spices to the Orient. It’s no good giving my heart and my soul because you already have these. So I’ve brought you a mirror. Look at yourself and remember me.”
Rumi
Beyond the Quote (Day 400)
Read these words and remember your mirror. You are not without the gold that you so desperately seek; it is already within you. You are not without a source to quench the thirst of your desire; for you are the source itself. The gifts that you so longingly crave do not come from others; they come from inside you.
Read More »Rumi Quote on Gifts and How Nothing Seems RightLove should never bind you; love should set you free.
“A soulmate isn’t someone who completes you. No, a soulmate is someone who inspires you to complete yourself. A soulmate is someone who loves you with so much conviction, and so much heart, that it is nearly impossible to doubt just how capable you are of becoming exactly who you have always wanted to be.”
Unknown
Beyond the Quote (Day 399)
Chains, handcuffs, prisons—are things that confine. If we were to pick emotions that most matched these confining forces we might pick dependency, jealousy, insecurity. Each of these emotions are thrust from one person to another in an emotional attempt to keep them bound. So that one doesn’t leave the other; so that one doesn’t hurt the other; so that their expectations and conditions can remain in tact over the other—this is not love.
Read More »Love should never bind you; love should set you free.“’You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,’ she says now. ‘You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.’”
Tara Westover, Educated