Infinite love

“ That love seems to me, like it, infinite—eternal. I feel as if my heart overflowed to embrace the world, even as the ocean, with its bright waves of love. It is in me and around me; it is the only great and immortal feeling which I possess. ”

“ Is it lack of love that keeps us from heaven? But one mystery succeeds another, and the final gate is never passed. What is love? All my awakening understanding tells me it is life. But if I ask what life is, I am dazzled by rays proceeding from the source of the Infinite! ”

“ God! worthy of infinite love, I love Thee with my whole heart, more than I love myself; and I protest that I desire to die making an act of love, that I may thus continue to love Thee eternally in heaven, which for this end I desire and ask of Thee. ”

“ The other stays at home and draws the world to him. The one loves merely himself. The other loves all the world; but in his larger love for all the world he finds himself included.
Verily, then, the more one loves the nearer he approaches to God, for God is the spirit of infinite love. And when we come into the realization of our oneness with this Infinite Spirit, then divine love so fills us that, enriching and enrapturing our own lives, from them it flows out to enrich the life of all the world. ”

“ A love so vast and far-reaching that there is no place where it is not; it enfolds not only our little world, poised in infinite space like a mote in a sunbeam, but all the shining, rolling worlds beyond. Every star that rises within our sight and all the million stars beyond, in misty distances so great as to be incomprehensible, are guided and surrounded by this same love. ”

“ On the other hand, you see, there will be no other phantom near you but mine, no other image but mine. I feel that I shall be always near you, yes, always, eternally, my beloved! Dear death! blessed death! which renders our love infinite, yes, infinite. ”

“ Hast thou not known and felt the existence of that Being, whose infinity consists not only in his strength, in his wisdom, and his eternity, but also in his love and in his justice? Canst thou forget the time when the blue sky by day and the blue sky by night opened on thee, as if the mildness of God was looking down on thee? Hast thou not felt the love of the Infinite, when it veiled itself in its image, in loving hearts of men ”

“ Love to be love must feel itself infinite, or as nearly infinite as anything human can be. When I can't pour it out in that way—when I pause to reflect how far I can go, or reach a point beyond which I see that I cannot go any further—I do not truly love. ”

“ The capability of endless growth, the mating of two souls beyond the spheres and through all ages was the message of high emprise that called her like the voice of a star. With the heart of love, with the wings of immortality came the third revelation, reaching to infinite depths and heights, revealing the ineffable space where self is lost in the divine. ”

“ Pure love is as endless and infinite as time and space, and its mystery is deep to these shining throngs of Heaven who look into one another's faces with untrammeled emotions. Think of falling in love with the inhabitants of other worlds and of having the capacity and right to foster a thousand or more types of affinity, each one differing from the others! ”

“ Yet, it is something difficult for us to realize in our hours of darkness and despondency, that toward us personally and individually, the great heart of Infinite Love yearns with tenderness and pity. ”

“ Love—neither hunger nor thirst nor passion nor the need of sleep; neither a perception of the senses nor a physical demand, yet streaming divinely through any or all of these as only light may stream—the heavenly signal of a star to earth, through infinite darkness, illimitable space. ”

“ Certainly such highly abstract terms convey little distinct meaning. It will be found upon examination, that the word “Infinite,” to stir in any degree the depths of our nature, must be combined with some quality with which we are familiar. Infinite love, infinite justice, infinite purity, are things which we can in some degree understand and appreciate; but the point which we understand best is not the “Infinite,” but the finite,—the love,—the justice,—the purity; and these are ideas taken from what we find in some imperfect degree in ourselves. ”

“ And that fulness of human love becomes a faint type and interpreter of the Infinite, as through it we glide into grander harmonies and enlarged relations with the Universe, urged on forever by insatiable desires and far-reaching aspirations which testify our celestial origin and intimate our immortal destiny. ”

“ It is a commonplace experience that genuine love will awaken in the soul new and transcendent emotions, compared to which all previous experience appears petty and insignificant. The waves of this emotion are able to carry the lover to the infinite, or at least his emotion will help him to divine the infinite. He sees, unexpectedly, his inmost soul revealed to him, he has exceeded the limits upon which he has hitherto looked as a matter of course; the barrier between him and the universe has fallen, the whole world belongs to him ”

“ The delight, the spontaneity, the satisfaction, the keenness, all die out before the person dies. The pulp shrivels, and only a wrinkled skin of habit remains. But a woman is immortal. Can a mortal love satisfy an immortal heart? Is it possible that an undying soul must find its strongest development in a dying love? Does a creature of the skies incur an irreparable loss, miss an irreclaimable jewel, suffer an incurable wound, when it loses, or misses, or suffers anything which is but of the earth earthy? Can anything finite be indispensable to an infinite life? ”

“ The moment we recognize ourselves as one with it we become so filled with love that we see only the good in all. And when we realize that we are all one with this Infinite Spirit, then we realize that in a sense we are all one with each other. ”

“ Well, we shall, at any rate, never part again! No human alloy shall ever disturb our love, infinite in its phases and as pure as all things are which are One—our love, vast as the sea, vast as the sky! ”

“ The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.
Love participates of the soul itself. ”

“ In love at one of its poles you find the personal, and at the other the impersonal. At one you have the positive assertion - Here I am; at the other the equally strong denial - I am not. Without this ego what is love? And again, with only this ego how can love be possible?
Bondage and liberation are not antagonistic in love. For love is most free and at the same time most bound. If God were absolutely free there would be no creation. The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one. ”

“ It is indeed true that we can see or that we can conjecture that behind the present romance there may have lain an epic story of the hero's actions, but what we see now is nothing but the story of the 'infinite passion', the 'infinite pain' of the human heart. It is the story of their fatal love, of the passion which drives them out of the homes of men into the wilderness, the fatal passion which separation only makes deeper, which nothing can change, nothing can end, the story of a man and woman to whom the world is well lost for love. ”

“ 166THE WAY Between the finite and the infinite
The missing link of Love has left a void.
Supply the link, and earth with Heaven will join
In one continued chain of endless life. ”

“ This love as object must be co-eternal with the infinite, because by the law of immanence which governs the genesis of infinite life, every origination in the infinite must be co-eternal with the infinite.
By the same law also, it must be identical and one with the infinite; because love, being originated by an immanent act, terminates inside of the infinite, and is, therefore, identical with the infinite. The love as object, therefore, is coeternal and identical with the infinite; it is the infinite. ”

“ Moreover, though in millions of individual cases the statement and the sincere belief that the love experienced will remain changeless and eternal, are contradicted by later fact, it is at least true that the passion itself is an ever-recurring phenomenon of life, and does, by its infinite recurrence and resurrection in form beyond form through evolving generations, present to finite minds an aspect of immortality. ”

“ As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet. ”

“ Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well.
O thou beautiful, there in the nest is thy love that encloses the soul with colours and sounds and odours.
There comes the morning with the golden basket in her right hand bearing the wreath of beauty, silently to crown the earth.
And there comes the evening over the lonely meadows deserted by herds, through trackless paths, carrying cool draughts of peace in her golden pitcher from the western ocean of rest.
But there, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. ”

“ But, can't you see that progress in affection needn't be a limited journey to a finite end, even the end of the flower, but, no matter how fast one travels, if one is really in love, the goal is always infinitely distant? ”

“ Affection had reared for it a noble fabric of hope. Perhaps the beauty had begun to shine out in the face, and the hands had begun to show their skill. Then death came and all the fair hopes were folded away. The visions of loveliness and the dreams of noble attainments and achievements lay like withered flowers upon the grave. An unfinished life! friends cry in their disappointment and sorrow. So it seems, surely, to love's eyes, from the earth-side. But so it is not, as God's eye looks upon it. There is nothing unfinished that fulfils the divine plan. ”

“ And this always takes place when all is fashioned to our liking: then into our dream strides the wielder of the lightning: we get glimpse of the great beyond thronged with mighty, exultant, radiant beings: our own deeds become infinitesimal to us: the colours of our imagination, once so shining, grow pale as the living lights of God glow upon them. We find a little honey in the heart which we make sweeter for some one, and then another lover, whose forms are legion, sighs to us out of its multitudinous being: we know that the old love is gone. ”

“ If misfortune be solemnly decreed to you by heaven and earth, if it hold you in an indissoluble spell, oh, then have courage to grasp happiness yourself; grasp that which heaven and earth would deny you. But intense love is bliss, bliss unutterable; its intensity is not measured by its lastingness--the moment is its watchword. In your arms, from your kisses I have felt what, until now, life could never give me; what only as the dream of the supreme was quickened in my soul. To every human being is granted one supreme moment--once birth and death--once the bliss of perfect love! ”

“ Love is from the first, and will be to the end, and beyond the end; love is so eternal, so great, so whole, that this mortal life of ours is but as a tiny instant, a moment of pausing in our journey from one star-world to another along the endless paths of heavenly glory we shall tread, together—it is nothing, this worldly life of ours. ”

“ The heart whose beat measured an eternity of love to you lies under your feet but the love of her still lives in your being. You forget the injury, you forget the disgrace, you forget all of the present, only remembering the happiness of the past. You know she lives in a world where sunshine has been overshadowed by clouds, yet you love her all the more, although to you she is even further removed than by death. ”

“ While the sun shone with that dazzling light in which her love was born and grew till it possessed her whole being, she was kept firm in her unwavering resolve by the mysterious whisperings of desire which filled her heart with impatient longing for the darkness that would mean the end of danger and strife, the beginning of happiness, the fulfilling of love, the completeness of life. ”

“ Every aspect of the universe leaves new impressions on us, and our wills, in their world-sweep, daily desire different things.
Incompleteness lies on life—restlessness is in the heart. True love has no final habitation on earth; there is no abiding-place for our deepest affection, our most tender yearning. ”

“ No tie of our present earth life could be weighed against that idea of a spirit love, enduring through the ages; a love transcending and immortal, repeating itself in ever ascending stages of rapture. ”

“ Love, look not back, nor fill thy heart with woe
Of old, sad loves that perished long ago;
For ever after living lovers tread
Pale, yearning ghosts of all earth's lovers dead.
A little while with life we lead the train
Ere we, too, follow, cold, some breathing love.
I fear their fevered eyes and hands that strain
To snatch our joy that flutters bright above,
To shadow with grey death its ruddy, pulsing glow.
Love, look not back in this life-crowning hour
When all our love breaks into perfect flower
Beneath the kindling heights of frozen time. ”

“ The enduring passions flash like the lightning; they scorch the soul, but it is warmed forever! Miserable the creature whose love rises by degrees upon the frigid morning of the mind! Amid the gloom and sorrow of existence, suddenly to behold a form having a kindred soul, and to feel an overwhelming conviction that, with that form, our destiny must be forever entwined; that there is no more joy but in his joy, no sorrow but when he grieves; that in the warmth of his love, in his smile of fondness, is all future bliss—this is love. Magnificent, sublime, divine sentiment! ”