The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being, and the extension of a single being until it reaches God - that is love.

Love is the salute of the angels to the stars.

How sad the heart is when the rendered sad by love!

How great is the void created by the absence of the being who alone fills the world. How true it is that the beloved becomes God. It is understandable that God would grow jealous if the Father of All Things had not so evidently created all things for the soul, and the soul for love.

It needs no more than a smile, glimpsed beneath a hat of white crepe adorned with lilac, for the soul to be transported into the palace of dreams.

God is behind all things, but all things conceal God. Objects are black and human creatures are opaque. To love a person is to render them transparent.

There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars - all the beauties of creation. And why should they not? all the works of God are designed to serve love, and love has the power to charge all nature with its messages

Oh, spring, you are a letter which I send!

The future belongs far more to the heart than to the mind. Love is the one thing that can fill and fulfil eternity. The infinite calls for the inexhaustible.

Love partakes of the soul, being of the same nature. Like the soul, it is the divine spark, incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is the fiery particle that dwells in us, immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine and nothing extinguish. We feel its glow in the marrow of our bones and see its brightness reaching to the depths of heaven.

Oh, love, adoration, the rapture of two spirits which know each other, two hearts which are exchanged, two looks which interpenetrate! You will come to me, will you not, this happiness! To walk together in solitude! Blessed and radiant days! I have sometimes thought that now and then moments my be detached from the lives of angels to enrich the lives of men.

God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love except to make it unending. After a lifetime of love an eternity of love is indeed an increase; but to heighten the intensity, the ineffable happiness that love confers upon the spirit in this world, is an impossibility, even for God. God is the wholeness of Heaven; love is the wholeness of man.

We look up at a star for two reasons, because it shines and because it is impenetrable. But we have at our side a gentler radiance and a greater mystery, that of women.

Each of us, whoever he may by, has his breathing self. Lacking this, or lacking air, we suffocate. And then we die. To die for lack of love is terrible. It is the stifling of the soul.

When love has melted and merged two persons in a sublime and sacred unity, the secret of life has been revealed to them: they are no longer anything but the two aspects of a single destiny, the wings of a single spirit. To love is to soar!

On the day when a woman in passing sheds light for you as she goes, you are lost, you are in love. There is only one thing to be done, to fix your thoughts upon her so intently that she is compelled to think of you.

That which love begins can be completed only by God.

True love is plunged in despair or rapture by a lost glove or by a found handkerchief; but it needs eternity for all its devotion and its hopes. It is composed of both the infinitely great and the infinitely small.

If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.

Nothing satisfies love. We achieve happiness and long for Eden; we gain paradise and long for Heaven.

I say to you who love that all these things are contained in love. You must learn to find them. Love encompasses all Heaven, all contemplation, and, more than Heaven, plysical delight.

'Does she still visit the Luxembourg?'...'No, Monsieur'... 'It is in this church, is it not, that she attends Mass?' ...'She does not come here any more'...'Does she still live in this house?'...'She has moved elsewhere'...'Where has she gone to live?'...'She did not say.'

How grievous not to know the address of one's soul!

Love has its childishness; other passions have pettiness. Shame on the passions that make us petty; honour to the one that makes us a child!

A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. there is a person who, departing, took away the sun.

Oh, to lie side by side in the same tomb and now and then caress with a finger-tip in the shades, that will
do for my eternity!

You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love is to live by it.

Love! A dark and starry transfiguration is mingled with that torment. There is ecstasy in the agony.

Oh, the happiness of birds! It is because they have a nest that they have a song.

Love is a heavenly breath of the air of Paradise.

Deep hearts and wise minds accept life as God made it. It is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparaion for an unknown destiny. This destiny, his true one, begins for man on the first stair within the tomb. Something appears to him, and he begins to perceive the finality. Take heed of that word, finality. The living see infinity; the finality may be seen only by the dead. In the meantime, love and suffer, home and meditate. Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, apperances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.

I encountered in the street a penniless young man who was in love. His hat was old and his jacket worn, with holes at the elbows; water soaked through his shoes, but starlight flooded through his soul.

How wonderful it is to be loved, but how much greater to love! The heart becomes heroic through passion; it rejects everthing that is not pure and arms itself with nothing that is not noble and great. An unworthy thought can no more take root in it that a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene spirit, immune from all base passion and emotion, prevailing over the clouds and shadows of this world, the follies, lies, hatreds, vanities and miseries, dwells in the azure of the sky and feels the deep and subterranean shifts of destiny no more than the mountain-peak feels the earthquake.\If there were no one who loved the sun would cease to shine.