We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it.
Jose MartiRead
But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.
Interpretation
Love has the power to ignite passion and bring down oppressive forces.
In this quote, Jose Marti compares love to the sun, emphasizing its ability to illuminate and transform. He suggests that while societies may build systems of greed and privilege over centuries, the purifying and passionate essence of love can challenge and dismantle these structures, uniting those who are oppressed and fostering a sense of justice and indignation against tyranny.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a speech about social justice and the power of love in activism.
We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it.
Like bones to the human body, the axle to the wheel, the wing to the bird, and the air to the wing, so is liberty the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is imperfect.
Men have no special right because they belong to one race or another: the word man defines all rights.
Other famous men, those of much talk and few deeds, soon evaporate. Action is the dignity of greatness.
Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state. Man is a wing.
Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.
True love does not pay attention to the evil it suffers. It rejoices in doing good.
In the end, love wins. It does win. We know it wins. When a person dies, love isn’t turned off like a faucet. It is an amazingly resilient part of us.
But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.
The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy. In my mind it’s a little bit of both, and no matter how you choose to view it in the end, it does not change the fact that it involves a great deal of my life and the path I’ve chosen to follow.
In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.
If I could for a moment just inspire you to love yourself, that would be worth EVERYTHING
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