Love

And now, let me show you the most excellent way.

If I speak in tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prphecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always procects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where thre are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongeus, they will be stifled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a chid, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

-1Corinthians Ch. 13

Never be embarrassed to talk about hallowed things, like love and death. We Americans are a little finicky about both. We reduce love to sex and talk about it clinically as in Kinsey and the sex books, or grossly as in Playboy and Penthouse, or sentimentally as in the popular songs. There´s very little talk about the tragic side of love, the comic side of love, love as a discipline, love as a means of education, love as the end and aim of education, the very reason we´re here today.
And as for death, wie hide from it, pretty it up, pack it away in hospitals, spend millions every year on lavish funerals, or get so glutted with it over the media that we hear or read, with hardly a tremor, about hundreds of thousands dying in Vietnam, or Africa, or Bangladesh.

Alicia: How big is the universe?
Nash: Infinite.
Alicia: How do you know?
Nash: I know because all the data indicates it's infinite.
Alicia: But it hasn't been proven yet.
Nash: No.
Alicia: You haven't seen it.
Nash: No.
Alicia: How do you know for sure?
Nash: I don't, I just believe it.
Alicia: It's the same with love I guess.


From »A beautiful mind«

Love ... Love can be so beautiful!!!
But love can also cause the hardest pain you ever had :-(

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.

(Willa Cather)

Well, sex is in the database, so I thought love should be there also.

my love for life is currently being drained by this monstrous contraption that is eating all these words out of my fingers and storing them as patterns on some lifeless machine. It was enough. I'm going to the pub now.

Lately the lad learnt, that longer than love lasts it leaves you lonely.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

(Gilbert K. Chesterton)

Love is. It just is. Metaphorically speaking, it's one of the most powerful forces in the universe. It brings people together. Nobody knows why. It hurts, and it is fantastic at the same time. Feathers of lead, bright smoke.

Love doesn't exist. It's all hype. There's sex, there's like, there's passion and there's power (or the lack thereof) – but love is a rumour perpetrated by greetings card manufacturers and writers of fairy tales. What a disservice we do ourselves by refusing to face this reality; by plunging headlong, eyes wide open, into the morass of conflicting feelings that we have been hoodwinked into believing is lurve!

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.

(John Ciardi)