More company increases happiness, but does not lighten or diminish misery.
Thomas TraherneRead
We love we know not what, and therefore everything allures us.
Interpretation
Love is often irrational and unattached to specific things, leading us to be drawn to many experiences and people.
This quote by Thomas Traherne suggests that our understanding of love is often limited or unclear, which in turn allows us to be captivated by various aspects of life. By acknowledging that we love without fully knowing the reasons behind our affection, we open ourselves up to a myriad of attractions and experiences, highlighting the fluid and mysterious nature of love itself.
In practice
In a wedding speech highlighting the unpredictable nature of love.
More company increases happiness, but does not lighten or diminish misery.
We do not ignore maturity. Maturity consists in not losing the past while fully living in the present with a prudent awareness of the possibilities of the future.
Happiness was not made to be boasted, but enjoyed. Therefore tho others count me miserable, I will not believe them if I know and feel myself to be happy; nor fear them.
To love one person with a private love is poor and miserable: to love all is glorious.
You never know yourself till you know more than your body.
Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.
The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)
What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!
When I look on you a moment, then I can speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a wet sweat bathes me and a trembling seizes me all over.
Tonight love and hate met in St. Louis. And love outnumbered the hate, in poetic thousands. Hate left. But love stayed. + Together, we sang.
Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me. Be silent.
I pray every night that I may live after him; because I would rather be miserable than that he should be β that proves I love him better than myself.
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