I'm not doing anything, and yet I'm also doing the most important thing a man can do: I'm listening to what I needed to hear from myself.
Paulo CoelhoRead
All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that's a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly.
Interpretation
True love is not a form of enslavement, but a source of freedom and fulfillment.
In this quote, Paulo Coelho challenges the misconception that love restricts individual freedom, instead proposing that genuine love enhances one's sense of freedom and fullness. He emphasizes that the act of giving oneself completely to another person results in the deepest sense of liberation and joy, suggesting that love is an expression of true freedom rather than a constraint.
In practice
During a wedding speech, one might use this quote to emphasize the beauty of love in a marriage.
I'm not doing anything, and yet I'm also doing the most important thing a man can do: I'm listening to what I needed to hear from myself.
Each stone, each bend cries welcome to him. He identifies with the mountains and the streams, he sees something of his own soul in the plants and the animals and the birds of the field.
We need to clear our minds of bad thoughts.
Having the courage to take the steps we always wanted to take is the only way of showing that we trust in God.
The fool who loves giving advice on our garden never tends his own plants
Sometimes the Warrior feels as if he were living two lives at once.
She had never imagined that curiosty was one of the many masks of love .
And as we drift into sleep, I feel something I’ve never felt before. A closeness that isn’t merely physical. A connection that defies the fact that we’ve only just met. A sensation that can only come from the most euphoric of feelings: belonging.
What is a child, but a piece of the parent enrapt up in another skin? And yet our dearest children are but as strangers to us, in comparison of the unspeakable dearness that was between the Father and Christ. Now, that he should ever be content to part with a Son, and such an only One, is such a manifestation of love, as will be admired to all eternity.
Speak any language, Turkish, Greek, Persian, Arabic, but always speak with love
How beautiful you are! You are more beautiful in anger than in repose. I don't ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me.
A woman is more beautiful than the world in which I live; and so I close my eyes.
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