What is the main thing in love? To know and to hide. To know about the one you love and to hide that you love. At times the hiding (shame) overpowers the knowing (passion). The passion for the hidden — the passion for the revealed.
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The House at Old Pimen, ch. 2 (1934)Marina Tsvetaeva
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For help of this, full meekly our Lord shewed the patience that He had in His Hard Passion; and also the joying and the satisfying that He hath of that Passion, for love. And this He shewed in example that we should gladly and wisely bear our pains, for that is great pleasing to Him and endless profit to us. And the cause why we are travailed with them is for lack in knowing of Love. Though the three Persons in the Trinity be all even in Itself, the soul took most understanding in Love; yea, and He willeth that in all things we have our beholding and our enjoying in Love. And of this knowing are we most blind. For some of us believe that God is Almighty and may do all, and that He is All-Wisdom and can do all; but that He is All-Love and will do all, there we stop short. And this not-knowing it is, that hindereth most God’s lovers, as to my sight.
Julian of Norwich
To live this life, my friends, you have to have a genuine passion. Nothing artificial. To live this life, to love this life, you have to have a genuine passion. People think Kabir was so wonderful because he was uneducated and yet he said all these wonderful things. Do you think it would have been different had Kabir gone to Yale and Oxford? If so, you missed the point. The point isn't whether he was educated or not, because, in the truest sense, he was very educated. More educated than most people. The point is that passion. Maybe you won't be able to write like Kabir, but you can feel the same passion. Passion is the point. That love is the point. That feeling is the point. That is achievable by everyone sitting in this hall, and in the city of London, and on this planet Earth. That passion. That love. That awakening. That joy.
Maharaji (Prem Rawat)
Passion is something which very few of us have really felt. What we may have felt is enthusiasm, which is being caught up in an emotional state over something. Our passion is for something: for music, for painting, for literature, for a country, for a woman or a man; it is always the effect of a cause. When you fall in love with someone, you are in a great state of emotion, which is the effect of that particular cause; and what I am talking about is passion without a cause. It is to be passionate about everything, not just about something, whereas most of us are passionate about a particular person or thing. I think one must see this distinction very clearly. In the state of passion without a cause, there is intensity free of all attachment; but when passion has a cause, there is attachment, and attachment is the beginning of sorrow.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The passion of Christ is the victory of divine love over the powers of evil, and therefore it is the only supportable basis for Christian obedience. Once again, Jesus calls those who follow him to share his passion. How can we convince the world by our preaching of the passion when we shrink from that passion in our own lives? On the cross Jesus fulfilled the law he himself established and thus graciously keeps his disciples in the fellowship of his suffering.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Honesty is difficult. It is easier to hide in the crowed and to drown one’s own guilt in that of the human race, easier to hide from oneself than to become open in honesty before God. This honesty is certainly not a perpetual enumerating, but neither is it the signing of a name on a piece of white paper, a signed confession to an empty generality; and a confessor is not a co-signatory in the human race’s enormous account book. But without honesty there is no repentance. Repentance is nauseated by the empty generality, but it is not a pretty arithmetician in the service of the faintheartedness-rather an earnest observer before God. To repent of a generality without substance is a contradiction, akin to inviting the most profound passion to dine on superficiality, but to tie one’s repentance to a particular is to repent of one’s own responsibility and not before God, and to vitiate the intention is self-love in depression. If it so easy to repent: to love and to feel one’s wretchedness ever more deeply, to love while the punishment is being suffered, to love and not want to falsify the punishment as divine dispensation, to love and not want to hide secret resentment as if one suffered an injustice, to love and not want to stop seeking the sacred source of this pain!
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Tsvetaeva, Marina
Tuan, Yi-Fu
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