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?
No,' he said, 'memory's a poor thing to have. It's your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn't know I could ever love anything so much.
On the question of relating to our fellowman - our neighbor's spiritual need transcends every commandment. Everything else we do is a means to an end. But love is an end already, since God is love.
I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
MY river runs to thee: Blue sea, wilt welcome me? My river waits reply. Oh sea, look graciously! I βll fetch thee brooks From spotted nooks,β Say, sea, Take me!
What is important is how well we love. God will make our _x000D_ love fruitful, whether we see that fruitfulness or not.
A woman of seven and twenty, said Marianne, after pausing a moment, can never hope to feel or inspire affection again.
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