Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Interpretation
Poets uniquely experience love as essential, often believing it is universally vital.
In this quote by Hannah Arendt, the assertion is that poets approach love with a perspective that elevates its significance, viewing it not just as important but as a vital experience that shapes their lives and art. This deep connection to love leads them to believe that everyone shares this necessity, indicating a more profound philosophical contemplation of love's place in human experience.
In practice
In a speech about the role of creativity in emotional expression.
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses its quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.
Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.
We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friendβs presence, is concerned with the common world.
Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.
Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.
It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.
To the degree you experience God's love towards you - seeing you as beautiful and radiant - to that degree sex won't ruin your life.
I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.
If you find that thing you love, it doesn't necessarily matter whether you do it well or not-you just need to do it.
I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.
In the summer I stretch out on the shore And think of you. Had I told the sea What I felt for you, It would have left its shores, Its shells, Its fish, And followed me.
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
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