Love and Marriage |
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Common terms and phrases
able already attain beautiful become celibacy child choice Christianity claims consciousness courage Courts of Love culture danger demand desire duty elective affinity Ellen Key emotion enhancement ennobling erotic evolutionism existence experience father favourable feeling fidelity force free divorce free love George Sand give greater hand happiness Havelock Ellis healthy higher human husband idea ideal immorality important increased individual instinct labour latter less liberty live love's freedom love's selection lovers Lutheran majority man's mankind marriage married means ment monogamy mother motherhood motherliness nature needs ness never one's parents passion perfect personal love point of view polygamy possess possible present day Protestantism question race Rahel Varnhagen realisation regard render Scandinavia sense sexual abstinence sexual morality social society soul spiritual suffering thing thought tion transformation true uncon unity unmarried whole wife woman women young youth
Popular passages
Page 143 - I draw you close to me, you women, I cannot let you go, I would do you good, I am for you, and you are for me, not only for our own sake, but for others...
Page 72 - Great love arises only when desire of a being of the other sex coalesces with the longing for a soul of one's own kind. It is like fire, the hotter it is, the purer; and differs from the ardour of desire as the white heat of a smelting-furnace differs from the ruddy, smoking flames of a torch carried along the streets.
Page 14 - Only cohabitation can decide the morality of a particular case — in other words, its power to enhance the life of the individuals who are living together and that of the race. Thus sanction can never be granted in advance nor — with certain exceptions relating to children — can it be denied to any matrimonial relationship. Each fresh couple, whatever form they may choose for their cohabitation, must themselves prove its moral claim.
Page 123 - free love," which is a much-abused term capable of many interpretations, we ought to strive for the freedom of love; for while the former has come to imply freedom for any sort of love, the latter must only mean freedom for a feeling which is worthy the name of love. This feeling, it may be hoped, will gradually win for itself the same freedom in life as it already possesses in poetry.
Page 45 - ... unfruitful. It must give life; if not new living beings then new values; it must enrich the lovers themselves and through them mankind.
Page 103 - In our time, ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost by the condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their destinies. The majority does not perceive, the advance in morality which this implies in. comparison with the code of so many men who, without responsibility — and without apparent risk — purchase the repose of their senses. The free union of 85 love, on the other hand, gives them an enhancement of life which they consider that they gain without injuring anyone.
Page 301 - One branch unexpectedly shoots out and another unaccountably withers." Personality is the ultimate test of moral value, and "unconditional fidelity to one person may be just as disastrous to the personality as unconditional continuance in a faith or an employment." This is a half-truth. Unconditional fidelity to one who, by persistent adultery, cruelty, debauchery, makes decency, selfrespect, .and proper conditions for children impossible, if it is ever justifiable as an act of voluntary renunciation...
Page 69 - It is still the desire of the active o' human being to relieve through comradeship the hardships of another and of himself at the same time. But above this eternal nature of love, beyond this primeval cause of marriage, another longing has grown with increasing strength. This is not directed towards the continuance of the race. It has sprung from man's sense of loneliness within his race, a loneliness which is ever greater in proportion as his soul is exceptional. It is the pining for that human...
Page 82 - Every developed modern woman wishes to be loved not en male but en artiste. Only a man whom she feels to possess an artist's joy in her, and who shows this joy in discreet and delicate contact with her soul as with her body, can retain the love of the modern woman. She will belong only to a man who longs for her always, even when he holds her in his arms. And when such a woman exclaims: 'You desire me, but you cannot caress, you cannot listen
Page 79 - The wise virgins' deadly sin against love is that they disdained to learn of the foolish ones the secret of fascination; that they would know none of the thousand things that bind a man's senses or lay hold on his soul; that they regarded the power to please as equivalent to the will to betray. When all women who can love are also able to make goodness fascinating and completeness of personality intoxicating, then Imogen will conquer Cleopatra.