Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.
Interpretation
Love often requires a level of vulnerability and surrender.
In this quote, Emerson explores the nature of love as an experience that eschews careful control and cautiousness. He suggests that true love involves a complete surrender and openness, where one gives themselves fully without reservation or self-protection, emphasizing that love transcends the qualities of self-control and foresight.
In practice
During a wedding ceremony, discussing the importance of vulnerability in a loving relationship.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
She is coming, my own, my sweet;_x000D_ _x000D_ Were it ever so airy a tread,_x000D_ _x000D_ My heart would hear her and beat,_x000D_ _x000D_ Were it earth in an earthly bed;_x000D_ _x000D_ My dust would hear her and beat,_x000D_ _x000D_ Had I lain for a century dead;_x000D_ _x000D_ Would start and tremble under her feet,_x000D_ _x000D_ And blossom in purple and red.
A lover cannot be chosen a la smorgasbord. A lover has to be chosen from soul-craving. To choose just because something mouthwatering stands before ou will never satisfy the hunger of the soul-self. And that is what the intuition is for; it is the direct messenger of the soul.
I would not wish any companion in the world but you.
Young love needs dangers and barriers to nourish it.
You know, the man of my dreams might walk round the corner tomorrow. I'm older and wiser and I think I'd make a great girlfriend. I live in the realm of romantic possibility.
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
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