saflori’s Reviews > Hints for Lovers > Status Update

‘Spirit is tangled into the very threads of our flesh. In some mysterious way, the body and the soul are nearly one. And yet, Love keeps reaching for the soul beneath the skin, often with quiet grief. When both the seeker and the sought are searching for each other, even the hardest battles are softened. But alas, the deepest part of the soul can never be fully seen—not even by love—not even by love.’

‘What folly were the violet to envy the rose!’

“It is but the reflection of himself in his mistress that many a foolish lover loves.”

The young think love is the winning-post of life; the old know it is a turn in the course. Nevertheless, it is a fateful turn.

Love is the most antinomial of emotions: it worships, yet it will not stop at sacrilege; it will build about its object a temple of adoration, then desecrate the fane; it will give all, yet ruthlessly seize everything; it delights in pleasing, yet it sometimes wittingly wounds; its ineffable tenderness often merges into an inclemency extraordinary;—symbol of universal duality, it is at once demonaical and angelic.

The defencelessness of woman is a conventional fiction: she can avert an attack by a look; she can terminate a siege by a taunt.

A woman's heart is an unfathomable ocean: nothing ever filled it; no one ever plumbed it. At the surface are glancing waves; beneath are silent depths invisible to man. A man's heart is the enclosing shore: measurable & impressionable; thinking to house that sea, shaping it, over-looking it and staying and governing its tides. Yet changed by it, crumbling before it, yielding to it: at once its guardian and its slave.

“From woman, whoe'er she be, there seems to emanate a potency ineffable to man, — impalpable, invisible, divine. It lies not in beauty or grace, not even in manner or mien; and it requires nor wiles nor artifice.”