Healthy Habits

One of the best things about marriage is that it gets young people to bed at a decent hour.

—M. M. MUSSELMAN,
20TH-CENTURY AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT

Love Helps You Grow

love makes me be the man
my mother threatened
i’d better become . . .

—MICHAEL DATCHER, CONTEMPORARY
AMERICAN POET, “UNTITLED” IN BLACK LOVE

The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds, and that’s what you’ve given me. That’s what I hope to give to you forever.

—YOUNG NOAH (RYAN GOSLING),
THE NOTEBOOK, BASED ON
THE NICHOLAS SPARKS NOVEL

The ideal that marriage aims at is that of spiritual union through the physical. The human love that it incarnates is intended to serve as a stepping-stone to divine or universal love.

—MOHANDAS GANDHI,
20TH-CENTURY INDIAN
POLITICAL LEADER

Our partner is essential to the discovery of our own calling, and in a curious way shows us what we want, or more exactly, shows us what is wanted of us from within ourselves and our world.

—THOMAS MOORE,
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN
PSYCHOTHERAPIST AND WRITER

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE,
19TH-CENTURY GERMAN WRITER

When a person is in love, he seems to himself wholly changed from what he was before; and he fancies that everybody sees him in the same light. This is a great mistake; but reason being obscured by passion, he cannot be convinced, and goes on still under the delusion . . .

—BLAISE PASCAL, 17TH-CENTURY FRENCH
MATHEMATICIAN AND PHILOSOPHER, ON THE PASSION OF
THE SOUL, TRANSLATED BY GEORGE PEARCE

I harbor within—we all do—a vision of my highest self, a dream of what I could and should become. May I pursue this vision, labor to make real my dream. Thus will I give meaning to my life.

—REFORM JEWISH PRAYER BOOK GATES OF PRAYER

I want to get married. I’ve always wanted to get married. If I can get married, it means I’ve changed. I’m a new person.

—MURIEL (TONI COLLETTE), MURIEL’S WEDDING

SOCRATES: By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher . . . and that is a good thing for any man.

—PLATO, ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHER

I love you, not for what you are, but for what
I am when I am with you. I love you, not
only for what you have made of yourself, but
for what you are making of me. I love
you for the part of me that you bring out; I love
you for putting your hand into my heaped-up
heart and passing over all the foolish, weak
things that you can’t help dimly seeing there,
and for drawing out into the lights all the
beautiful belongings that no one else had
looked quite far enough to find. I love you
because you are helping me to make of the
lumber of my life not a tavern but a temple;
out of the works of my every day, not a
reproach, but a song. I love you because
you have done more than any creed could
have done to make me good, and more
than any fate could have done to make
me happy. You have done it without
a touch, without a word, without a sign.
you have done it by being yourself.
perhaps that is what being in love
means, after all.

—ROY CROFT,
20TH-CENTURY AMERICAN POET, “LOVE”

It is a lovely thing to have a husband and wife developing together. That is what marriage really means: helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life.

—PAUL TOURNIER, 20TH-CENTURY SWISS AUTHOR

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

—PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN,
19TH-/20TH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHER AND PRIEST,
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

Do you think it is easy to change?
Ah, it is very hard to change and be different.
It means passing through the waters of oblivion.

—D. H. LAWRENCE,
20TH-CENTURY BRITISH WRITER, CHANGE

Blessed are the man and the woman
who have grown beyond themselves . . .

—PSALM I, A BOOK OF PSALMS,
ADAPTED BY STEPHEN MITCHELL

[Love] . . . is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”) might young people use the love that is given them.

—RAINER MARIA RILKE, 20TH-CENTURY
GERMAN POET, LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

Love is not a possession but a growth.

—HENRY WARD BEECHER,
19TH-CENTURY AMERICAN CLERGYMAN

“There is an advantage to being married,” said the husband on his thirtieth anniversary. “You can’t make a fool of yourself without knowing it quickly.”

—ANONYMOUS

He that has not got a Wife, is not yet a complete man.

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN,
POOR RICHARD’S ALMANAC

Love in a Time of Sickness

Love cures people, both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.

—DR. KARL MENNINGER, 19TH-/20TH-CENTURY
AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIST AND WRITER

Love Sets You Free

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.

—SOPHOCLES, ANCIENT GREEK POET

Do you not also believe that, united, we could become freer and better than separate—excelsior? Will you risk going with me—as with one who struggles valiantly for liberation and progress on all the paths of life and thought?

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 19TH-CENTURY GERMAN
PHILOSOPHER, TO MATHILDE TRAMPEDACH IN
A LETTER, DATED 1876 (SHE TURNED HIM DOWN.)

my soul sings you
like sarah vaughn
a bird freed from cage
by your touch
quiet flutter of wings
the echo of my heart
being massaged
by our lust
inside
i am silently begging
your tongue
’tween my lips
only this time longer
as you till me like soil
for planting flowers
tend to me
like an english garden
with scent of fresth gardenia
tickling senses
of nose
brain
and heart
i’m a happy prisoner
who has been captured
by the charms
behind your eyes
where i hope to exist
that place where your soul lives
and secrets lay
waiting for me to free them
i have tear stained breasts
and thighs
wishing you would dry them
heavy footsteps
that are lightened
by your laughter
and your childlike eyes
that flame
when ignited
with excitement or fury
i want to drink them
like bee pollen
and sting you back
for marking me
like a vampiress
scenting me
with your own perfume
thank god
i can’t give you me yet
cause every ounce of me
would be your surrender
when we are ready
come and take me home
to your ancestors
cause i’ve been reincarnated
fifty lifetimes
waiting
to go home
with you

—TA’SHIA ASANTI,
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POET, “HOME WITH YOU”