We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.

Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, but God never will.

Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, but God never will.

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists ... in the loved one, perfection.

We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists ... in the loved one, perfection.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with read more

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, read more

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.