Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only “for a time”?
The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite—like books, like lives, like the universe itself.
The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity.
— Maria Popova
We navigate the unknown frontiers of the social universe through a sextant of existing relationships—nearly every new person we meet is within only a few degrees of separation from someone we already know.
But every once in a while, pure chance intercedes to remind us that whatever structures of control we may put into place, however much we may mistake the illusion of choice for the fact of choice, randomness is the reigning monarch of the universe.
— Maria Popova
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.
Maria Popova
- The Lord Gives Everything And Charges By Taking It BackThe Lord gives everything and charges by taking it back. What a bargain. Like being young for a while… — Jack Gilbert from poem The Lost Hotels of Paris
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- There’s A Good Possibility That You Won’t Get What You Pray ForThis, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t… Read more: There’s A Good Possibility That You Won’t Get What You Pray For
- I Know You Are There By How Often I Feel Your AbsenceI know You are there by how often I feel Your absence, not at all like abandonment, not wholly like loneliness, which has its share… — Derrick Austin from poem Audience