A HEART UNDER A STONE.
The reduction of the Universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being as far as God,—such is love.
Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.
How sad the soul is when it is sad through love! What a void is the absence of the being who of her own self fills the world! Oh, how true it is that the beloved being becomes God! We might understand how God might be jealous, had not the Father of all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.
The soul only needs to see a smile in a white crape bonnet in order to enter the palace of dreams.
God is behind everything, but everything conceals God. Things are black and creatures are opaque, but to love a being is to render her transparent.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when the soul is kneeling, no matter what the attitude of the body may be.
Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand chimerical things, which, however, have their reality. They are prevented seeing each other, and they cannot write, but they find a number of mysterious ways to correspond. They send to each other the song of birds, the light of the sun, the sighs of the breeze, the rays of the stars, and the whole of creation; and why should they not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is sufficiently powerful to interest all nature with its messages.
Oh, Spring, thou art a letter which I write to her.
The future belongs even more to hearts than to minds. Loving is the only thing which can occupy and fill the immensity, for the infinite needs the inexhaustible.
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and is of the same nature as it. Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, and imperishable. It is a point of fire within us, which is immortal and infinite; which nothing can limit, and nothing extinguish. We feel it burning even in the marrow of our bones, and see its flashing in the depths of the heavens.
Oh, love! adoration! voluptuousness of two minds which comprehend each other, of two hearts which are exchanged, of two glances that penetrate one another! You will come to me, oh happiness, will you not? Walks with her in the solitudes, blest and radiant days! I have dreamed that from time to time hours were detached from the lives of the angels, and came down here to traverse the destinies of men.
God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except giving them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is in truth an augmentation; but it is impossible even for God to increase in its intensity the ineffable felicity which love gives to the soul in this world. God is the fulness of heaven, love is the fulness of man.
You gaze at a star for two motives, because it is luminous and because it is impenetrable. You have by your side a sweeter radiance and greater mystery,—woman.
All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. If they fail us, air fails us, and we stifle and die. Dying through want of love is frightful, for it is the asphyxia of the soul.
When love has blended and moulded two beings in an angelic and sacred union, they have found the secret of life; henceforth they are only the two terms of the same destiny, the two wings of one mind. Love and soar!
On the day when a woman who passes before you emits light as she walks, you are lost, for you love. You have from that moment but one thing to do; think of her so intently that she will be compelled to think of you.
What love begins can only be completed by God.
True love is in despair, or enchanted by a lost glove or a found handkerchief, and it requires eternity for its devotion and its hopes. It is composed at once of the infinitely great and the infinitely little.
If you are a stone, be a magnet; if you are a plant, be sensitive; if you are a man, be love.
Nothing is sufficient for love. You have happiness and you wish for Paradise. You have Paradise, and you crave for heaven. Oh, ye who love each other, all this is in love, contrive to find it there. Love has, equally with heaven, contemplation, and more than heaven, voluptuousness.
Does she still go to the Luxembourg? No, sir.—Does she attend mass in that church? She does not go there any longer.—Does she still live in this house? She has removed.—Where has she gone to live? She did not leave her address.
What a gloomy thing it is not to know where to find one's soul.
Love has its childishness, and other passions have their littleness. Shame on the passions that makes a man little! Honor to the one which makes him a child!
It is a strange thing, are you aware of it? I am in the night. There is a being who vanished and took heaven with her.
Oh! to lie side by side in the same tomb, hand in hand, and to gently caress a finger from time to time in the darkness, would suffice for my eternity.
You who suffer because you love, love more than ever. To die of love is to live through it.
Love, a gloomy starry transfiguration, is mingled with this punishment, and there is ecstasy in the agony.
Oh, joy of birds! they sing because they have the nest.
Love is the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of Paradise.
Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, an unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for man with the first step in the interior of the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definite. The definite, reflect on that word. The living see the infinite, but the definite only shows itself to the dead. In the mean while, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas, to the man who has only loved bodies, shapes, and appearances! Death will strip him of all that. Try to love souls, and you will meet them again.
I have met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the elbows in holes; the water passed through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.
What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a grander thing still to love! The heart becomes heroic by the might of passion. Henceforth it is composed of nought but what is pure, and is only supported by what is elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it than a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene soul, inaccessible to emotions and vulgar passions, soaring above the clouds and shadows of the world,—follies, falsehoods, hatreds, vanities, and miseries,—dwells in the azure of the sky, and henceforth only feels the profound and subterranean heavings of destiny as the summit of the mountains feels earthquakes.
If there were nobody who loved, the sun would be extinguished.