Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.
Interpretation
Love often requires a level of vulnerability and surrender.
In this quote, Emerson explores the nature of love as an experience that eschews careful control and cautiousness. He suggests that true love involves a complete surrender and openness, where one gives themselves fully without reservation or self-protection, emphasizing that love transcends the qualities of self-control and foresight.
In practice
During a wedding ceremony, discussing the importance of vulnerability in a loving relationship.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
nothing yet. I've been waiting." "for what?" she made no response. she could not tell him that she had been waiting for him.
What I need is a woman who is something, anything: either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.
She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
On the beach, at dawn: Four small stones clearly Hugging each other. How many kinds of love Might there be in the world, And how many formations might they make And who am I ever To imagine I could know Such a marvelous business? When the sun broke It poured willingly its light Over the stones That did not move, not at all, Just as, to its always generous term, It shed its light on me, My own body that loves, Equally, to hug another body.
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
The highest degree of love is Tatayyum (total enthrallment). The lowest degree is 'alaqah (attachment), when the heart is attached to the beloved: then comes sabahah (infatuation), when the heart is poured out: then gharam (passion), when love never leaves the heart: the nashaq (ardent love), and finally tatayyum.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.