Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
Ivan TurgenevRead
There is a sweetness in being the sole source, the autocratic_x000D_ and irresponsible cause of the greatest joy and profoundest pain to another.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the complexity of emotional dependence and the intensity of love and pain intertwined within relationships.
Turgenev's quote illustrates the dual nature of deep emotional connections, highlighting how a single person can bring immense joy and also profound pain to another. It emphasizes the weight of being the central figure in someone's emotional life, acknowledging the responsibilities and the emotional turbulence that can arise from such intimacy.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a discussion about the complexities of love in a relationship seminar.
Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me - a long, long road without a goal.
If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.
Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!
Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.
Men at most differ as Heaven and Earth, but women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.
Why was she always so craven, so apologetic? He had always seen Ruth as separate, good and untainted. As a child, his parents had appeared to him as starkly black and white, the one bad and frightening, the other good and kind. Yet as he had grown older, he kept coming up hard in his mind against Ruth's willing blindness, to her constant apologia for his father, to the unshakeable allegiance to her false idol.
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship-only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.
I say everything's about company. A gourmet meal with an asshole is a horrible meal. A hot dog with an interesting person is an amazing meal.
The remedy for most marital stress is not in divorce. It is in repentance and forgiveness, in sincere expressions of charity and service. It is not in separation. It is in simple integrity that leads a man and a woman to square up their shoulders and meet their obligations. It is found in the Golden Rule, a time-honored principle that should first and foremost find expression in marriage.
My life is rich because I have those kinds of people in my life.
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