Free love

“ I am not accountable to you, not even to you. I have never asked you to approve of me, to approve what I do, to love me. You are free also, free to love, free to withdraw your love. I follow the law of my own being. ”

“ The advocates of free love assert that it is unnatural repression that creates an undue and morbid longing; that freedom to satisfy the instinct would tend to keep it in its properly subordinate place. ”

“ The true freedom is when, by the direction of our will, we change 'must' into 'I delight to do Thy will.' So we are set free from the bondage and burden of a law that is external, and is not loved, and are brought into the liberty of, for dear love's sake, doing the will of the beloved. ”

“ Only by the hypocritical ignoring of a huge fact can any one contrive to talk of "free love"; as if love were an episode like lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune. Suppose whenever a man lit a cigarette, a towering genie arose from the rings of smoke and followed him everywhere as a huge slave. ”

“ With love alone is sentiment free, because it is pure in its principle, and because it draws its source from the seat of liberty, from the breast of our divine nature. Here, it is not the weak and base part of our nature that measures itself with the greater and more noble part; it is not the sensibility, a prey to vertigo, which gazes up at the law of reason. ”

“ I appeal, therefore, to those to whom the dispassionate discussion of "free love" seems quite outrageous, to remember that there are those to whom this teaching is not a mere excuse for licence, but an attempt to reach something lovelier and nobler than the present moral code, whose failures and insincerities no thinking person can ignore. ”

“ As if freedom were such a glorious thing! 140 Why, we are all slaves to some convention or passion or theory; none of us are free, really free, and we wouldn’t like it if we were. It may be all very well for the fantastic love of novels to be free, but that strange need of each other, which we call “love” in real life, for want of a better term—that must be forged into a bond, or what help is it to us poor vacillating mortals? ”

“ Love would direct the whole, and the indecorum of conventionality, of force, of falsehood and hypocrisy, would vanish. Would not the world be fairer, and, believe me, better? Conscious that no legal claim could exist between husband and wife, each would endeavour to retain the heart of the other by redoubled tenderness and self-sacrifice. Mankind would grow more amiable, more self-denying, and the mind would be fed on the freedom of the body. As long as we have no freedom of choice, our spirits must be enslaved. Have not men arrogated to themselves the right of free choice? ”

“ Oh, how blessed my soul will be when I shall see that thou hast cut thyself off from the world in deed and thought, and from thy own fleshly instincts, and hast united thyself to life eternal: a union that is of such joy and sweetness and suavity that it quenches all bitterness and renders light every heavy weight! Who, then, shall hold us from drawing the sword of hate and love, and cutting self from self with the hand of free will? As soon as this sword has cut, it is of such virtue that it unites. ”

“ I do not charge spiritists as a class with being advocates of the doctrines of free love. On the contrary, I am aware that, as a class, they hold the marriage relation in sacred regard. I cannot forget, however, that but a few years ago some of their leading advocates and mediums proclaimed the doctrine of free love in all its hideous deformity from every platform in the land. ”

“ Then came tidings of his death, tidings for which he may not have been responsible, but which he never contradicted, and I thought myself free—free to enjoy life, and the fortune that had so unexpectedly come to me; free to love and, alas! free to marry. ”

“ And now he casts from him, one after another, his opinions and speculations, and commences to live the life of perfect love toward all beings. With each opinion overcome and abandoned as a burden, there is an increased lightness of spirit, and he now begins to realize the meaning of being "free." ”

“ The voices of those who will love me, and use kindly phrases when they speak to me, will ring in my ears with an unknown beauty! Mere freedom—the dear gift of being able, at my own free-will, to seek the leafy glade of some old forest—or walk in the broad sunlight of an open plain, will be a rich reward for all that I have suffered! Oh! How can the world be unhappy while Heaven has left it youth, sunshine, and love? ”

“ And hence it is that the stormy struggles of free States have been blessed with results of Virtue, of Wisdom, and of Genius by Him who bade us love one another,—not only that love in itself is excellent, but that from love, which in its widest sense is but the spiritual term for liberty, whatever is worthiest of our solemn nature has its birth. ”

“ That entire and unswerving refusal to 'cage' another person, or to accept an affection not perfectly free and spontaneous, which will, we are fain to think, be always more and more the mark of human love, must inevitably bring its own price of mortal suffering with it; yet the Love so gained, whether in the individual or in society, will be found in the end to be worth the pang—and as far beyond the other love, as is the wild bird of Paradise that comes to feed out of our hands unbidden more lovely than the prisoner we shut with draggled wings behind the bars. ”

“ They do not suspect that free love as well as marriage includes many degrees of morality and immorality, rising above or sinking below the ethical zero, at which both the free love and the marriage of the majority are to be found. ”

“ This wealth in the elements of mutual dependence is what keeps fidelity in love both inwardly and outwardly. This soft current of the soul's depths keeps the sensuous charm fresh; while mere relation, both legal marriage and free union, very soon exhausts happiness and leaves behind ennui, if love has contained only sensuous attraction, and not that mutual feeling of dependence, which involves the union of the soul and the sense, and which unites the spirit and the sympathies. ”

“ But the expression is incorrect and ought to be "freedom in love." Indeed, can any other kind of love exist except free love? Can love be commanded or forced? Something of this sort seems hitherto to have been in the minds of our philosophers of love, who have learned their philosophy in Constantinople or Utah apparently, and who can let a slave pass as their beloved. Among all the daughters of the goddess Liberty there is none, who, according to her nature, must possess the properties of her mother in a higher degree than Love. Love and free love are therefore synonymous. ”

“ Free-lovers seem all in some indefinable way shoddy. Born shoddy. Men as well as women. Marriage is not an institution, it is an intuition. Marriage, or sooner or later absurdity. Free-love is better than absurdity.... ”

“ And to accept your youth, your golden period that never dawns but once on any human being, to gladden my declining years would be a selfish sin. I once had a dream—but it came to naught"—he drew a long breath as if the remembrance pained him. "You must be quite free, dear, to love and to marry. ”

“ He even asked himself, as he had done once or twice before in his life, whether her love for him implied the slightest dependence upon his society. Wasn't it perfectly possible that his going would free her life, would make it easier instead of harder? Every man, he knew, felt the element of freedom beneath the despair of breaking even the tenderest of ties. Some women, he supposed, might feel the same way about their love-affairs. ”

“ It is, in every sense of the word, a passion; that is to say, nothing of an active character mingles with the modification into which we have been moulded. And hence, in harbouring such love, we make no approach towards rising into the dignity of free and moral beings. ”

“ The reason why I object so emphatically to the introduction of the question here is because it is a question which admits of so many theories, physiological and religious, and what is technically called "free-love," that it is large enough for a movement of its own. ”

“ Yet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free;
Love me no more, but love my love of thee. ”

“ Are there any morals in the United States? We have heard awful things. There are the Mormons. There is co-education. And young girls of the best families go around loose with men day and night. What could be the result? Free love. And free love means cheap love or no love at all. Admittedly pretty low conditions for virtue. What else can be looked for in a country where all sorts of people come promiscuously from everywhere? Divorces, voting females, slatterns, homelessness, neglected, poorly educated children. ”

“ Among the men of our present education there are not ten in a hundred who are not sultans at heart. Under the reign of free love, many a one who now triumphantly recites the list of Don Juan, would sing the sentimental.tune of "Lonely am I, all alone." When I hear a man denounce even the theory of free love as a crime, I suspect him of being in practice a friend of free lust. ”

“ "Free love, so bound, were freëst," said the King.
"Let love be free; free love is for the best:
And, after heaven, on our dull side of death,
What should be best, if not so pure a love
Clothed in so pure a loveliness? yet thee
She failed to bind, though being, as I think,
Unbound as yet, and gentle, as I know." ”

“ There are, besides, certain practical consequences of which experience warns. Free love would mean that the pretty and well- developed girls, the handsomer and physically stronger men, would be besieged with solicitations and almost inevitably debauched by excess of temptation, while the less attractive would starve for love. ”

“ But Love is better than sight." "I love your love too much. And that is the worst fault, my beloved, I can ever find in my love of you." These are sentences that tell of what can be no private possession, being as liberal and free as our light and air. ”

“ Love when felt at all deeply has an element of transcendentalism in it, which makes it the most natural thing in the world for the two lovers—even though drawn together by a passing sex-attraction—to swear eternal troth to each other; but there is something quite diabolical and mephistophelean in the practice of the Law, which creeping up behind, as it were, at this critical moment, and overhearing the two thus pledging themselves, claps its book together with a triumphant bang, and exclaims: "There now you are married and done for, for the rest of your natural lives." ”

“ From the point of view of enhancement of life there will be nevertheless a great difference between the free—or lawful—love which is devoted, courageous, self-sacrificing, faithful, and that which leaves all the best human qualities unemployed.38 In the same way, the distance is great between the sterile erotic “adventures” of a paltry vanity, a sordid hunger for sensation, and the passion through which a human being attains to new creative power. The concession to the storm of passion is in one case the pennant, in the other the sail. ”

“ A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully-wedded happiness, but often of free and secret love; and in this respect too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. ”

“ Love is free: To promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow, in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry. ”

“ But clearly if that was the order of things, love and romance must establish their kingdom outside of marriage, and this was exactly what occurred.
"Since love is, by the nature of things, free and spontaneous, rebellion and revolution were inevitable unless womankind were to become something else than human." ”

“ Where is the heart that has not bow'd
A slave, eternal Love, to thee:
Look on the cold, the gay, the proud,
And is there one among them free? ”

“ If I have freedome in my love,
And in my soule am free,
Angels alone that sore above
Enjoy such liberty. ”

“ It is this: that more than one half of the better sort of the inhabitants have enter'd into a resolution of injoying free liberty in Love, without being Troubled or disturbed by its consequences. These mix and Cohabit together with the utmost freedom, and the Chilldren who are so unfortunate as to be thus begot are smother'd at the Moment of their Birth; many of these People contract intimacies and live together as man and wife for years, in the course of which the Children that are born are destroy'd. ”

“ Our love is principle, and has its root
In reason, is judicious, manly, free; ”

“ They highly demanded that the love relation should be free and independent, that it should be one in which proud and individual equals commune and communicate, and give to each other rich gifts, but make no demands and accept no sacrifices, and claim no tangible possession in the personality of the other. ”

“ “Let us redeem our great words from base uses. Let that no longer call itself Love, which knows that it is not free!” ”

“ And every effort love can make that man may be won is made, even to that of the agony and death of the lover that the loved one may be rescued from slavery to self, and brought into the life of love and the liberty wherewith Christ would make him free. ”

“ “Little dictionary sprite, sunshine vender, and girl to be loved, if I were a free man I would say to you—Come, little one, and let us learn of love. ”