I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe.
Interpretation
Strong emotions like love and admiration are essential to our existence.
This quote by Jean-Dominique Bauby emphasizes the profound necessity of strong emotions in human life. Just as breathing is vital for our physical well-being, the experience of love and admiration is essential for our emotional and spiritual health. Bauby's words remind us that our capacity to feel deeply is just as crucial as our biological needs.
In practice
This quote could be used in a romantic speech to express the importance of love.
Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.
Were one merely to seek information, one should inquire of the man who hates, but if one wishes to know what truly is, one better ask the one who loves
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
There's all kinds of reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another: Timing is important. Proximity is important. Mystery is important. You fall in love with somebody who's somewhat mysterious, in part because mystery elevates dopamine in the brain, probably pushes you over that threshold to fall in love.
The ladies men admire, I've heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light, They'd rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake 'till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints... So far I've had no complaints.
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again
Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.
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