Where a woman loves, she seldom doubts enough for her own safety. This love is d     ! In how many shapes does it make people shew themselves. I should be ungrateful not to love them for their love. None but the giddy love at first sight love everybody; but not their faults. Love will creep, where it cannot go. Love is a selfish deity. Of what absurd things does love make its votaries guilty!

Love is very subtle thing, and, like water, will work its way into the banks that are set up to confine it, if it be not watched, and dammed out in time. Platonic love is, in general, a dangerous allowance. Is love such a stayed, deliberate passion, as to allow a young creature to take time to ponder and weigh all the merits of its cause?

Love at first sight must indicate a mind prepared for impression, and a sudden gust of passion, and that of the least noble kind; since there could be no opportunity of knowing the merit of the object. Love on one side and discretion on the other is enough in conscience; and, in short, much better than love on both sides: for what room can there be for discretion, in the latter case?

I have found that truly to accept another person and his or her feelings is by no means an easy thing, any more than is understanding. Can I really permit another person to feel hostile toward me? Can I accept his anger as a real and legitimate part of himself? Can I accept him when he views life and its problems in a way quite different from mine?

Can I accept him when he feels very positively toward me, admiring me and wanting to model himself after me? All this is involved in acceptance and it does not come easy. I believe that it is an increasingly common pattern in our culture for each one person must feel and think and believe the same as I do.

We find it very hard to permit our children or our parents or our spouses to feel differently than we do about particular issues or problems. We cannot permit our clients or our students to differ from us or to utilize their experience I their own individual ways. On a national scale, we cannot permit another nation to think or feel differently than we do.

Yet it has come to seem to me that this separateness of individuals, the right of each individual to utilize his experience in his own way and to discover his own meanings in it—this is one of the most priceless potentialities of life. Each person is an island unto himself, in a very real sense; and he can only build bridges to  other islands if he is first of all willing to be himself and permitted to be himself.

Two paramount ingredients of love and affection are knowledge and acceptance—saying to the loved one, “I know you. I know you very well, and you are OK with me.” One or the other of these ingredients is very often missing in relationships that are called friendship or love. Perhaps I seem to accept you, but I do not know you very intimately—and therefore you might be afraid that when I do know you, I will not like or love you. Or perhaps, I do know you well, but always seem to be critical of your faults. In other words, I do not accept you.

These two elements are probably the most important ingredients in any love relationship—and in any therapy relationship, regardless of whether it is a traditional psychoanalysis or a modern group therapy situation. The patient comes to feel deeply understood and deeply accepted by the therapist. This is of paramount importance, because generally the patient does not feel much love or acceptance for himself. That is one of the major problems.

At this point, you might ask, “If those are the most central ingredients in therapy, why cannot a good friend, lover, or mate do just as good a job at helping someone in trouble?” That is a good question. Part is the answer is that such people can do a great deal to help. Is not real and unaffected tenderness for the infirmities of another, the very essence of love?

Peace is with those who Love.

She argued poor love out of doors. She did not seem to allow the possibility of any persons being in love at all. A man’s lover is a fire of olive-wood. It leaps higher every moment. There are different species of love that go under the same name. There is a love that begins in the head, and goes down to the heart, and grows slowly; but it last till death, and asks less than  it gives. There is another love, that blots out wisdom, that is sweet with the sweetness of life and bitter with the bitterness of death, lasting for an hour; but it is worth having lived a whole life for that hour.

There be loves many and gods many; and happy the man whose god and lover are one—happy for the time being; most miserable of mortals when the time of revelation comes and at one stoke both god and lover crumble into dust.

Life is too wonderful to hate in. We are all too nearly bound for hating. The party that loves most is always most willing to acknowledge the greater fault. Love, like despair, catches at straws. Everyone can tell a love letter that has ever received one. One knows them without opening—they are always folded hurriedly and sealed carefully, and the direction manifests a kind of tremulous agitation, that makes the state of the writer’s nerves. Love exists not without hope.