"If you are weak, dependent upon others, inclined to allow yourself to be
dominated by opinion, to take root wherever you see a little soil, make
for yourself a shield that will resist everything, for if you yield to
your weaker nature you will not grow, you will dry up like a dead plant,
and you will bear neither fruit nor flowers. The sap of your life will
dissipate into the formation of a useless bark; all your actions will be
as colorless as the leaves of the willow; you will have no tears to water
you, but those from your own eyes, to nourish you, no heart but your own.
"But if you are of exalted nature, believing in dreams and wishing to
realize them, I say to you plainly. Love does not exist.
"For to love is to give body and soul, or, better, it is to make a single
being of two; it is to walk in the sunlight, in the open air through the
boundless prairies with a body having four arms, two heads and two
hearts. Love is faith, it is the religion of earthly happiness, it is a
luminous triangle suspended in the temple of the world. To love is to
walk freely through that temple and to have at your side a being capable
of understanding why a thought, a word, a flower makes you pause and
raise your eyes to that celestial triangle. To exercise the noble
faculties of man is a great good, and that is why genius is glorious; but
to double those faculties, to place a heart and an intelligence upon a
heart and an intelligence--that is supreme happiness.
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