Tuesday 28 April 2009

words of wisdom: About Love


I'm having sort of a writer's block...The only thing that remains for me to do in order to fill-in the "silence" is to quote others.
And since anyway "nothing is said that has not been said before", here are some words by the Wise.*

Today I feel the need to say something, but also feel my words are not adequate to express it so publicly and I definitely lack the wisdom to say anything meaningful on the subject and remain abstract and impartial...So I use the words of others instead.

/*Based on personal experience and by deduction I totally agree with all of them./

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"Love in its essence is spiritual fire. "
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. "
Erich Fromm

"Love is the beauty of the soul. "
Saint Augustine

"The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope. "
Walter Benjamin

"It's better to have loved and lost than to have to do forty pounds of laundry a week. "
Laurence J. Peter

"We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love. "
Sigmund Freud

"Love is a serious mental disease. "
Plato

Helix Nebula


As a teenager (without any particular person's influence) I was very fascinated with (layman's) astronomy descriptions of the Cosmos, galaxies, constellations, stars, black holes, "red dwarfs", nebulae...
I remember when I was around 11 or 12 I read my first astronomy introductory book written by Issak Asimov (who at that time was one of my favourite writers since at the time I was reading a lot of science-fiction).
The names of this stellar objects and events have always sounded very mysterious to me.
For some reason I always felt the most fascinated with the word "nebula".*
It sort of rolls on the tongue, an implosion of sound.
The thought of it is absolutelly unfathomable, impossible, beautiful.
Here is a picture taken by NASA's Hubble telescope of the Helix Nebula in 2003. A very rare (and incredibly mysteriously beautiful) event.
For its grandeur and mystical beauty it was dubbed by some as "The Eye of God".
The Helix Nebula (what a name!) is the closest to us, standing at 690 light years from the Earth.
It's unimaginable.
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*A diffuse mass of interstellar dust or gas or both, visible as luminous patches or areas of darkness depending on the way the mass absorbs or reflects incident radiation.