One thing is impossible to love:  love cannot create love; the intensest and most fervent love is powerless to evoke a scintillation of love.

Love may worship, it may adore, it may transfigure, it may exalt the object of its devotion to the skies; but it cannot cause that object to emit one ray of love in return.

* * *

Hate may be concealed; love never.

* * *

The greater the imaginative altitude of love, the lower the boiling point.  But

Love cannot always be kept at high pressure.

* * *

The young think love is the winning-post of life, the old know it is a turn in the course.  Nevertheless, it is a fateful turn.

* * *

In love, the imagination plays a very large part.  And this may be variously interpreted.  Thus,

By man, love is regarded as a sort of sacred religion; by woman, as her every-day morality.  The former is the more exhilarating; but the latter is more serviceable.  Indeed,

Love and religion are very near akin:  both inspire, and both elevate.  And

If faith, hope, and charity are the basis of religion, there never was such as religion as love.  And

Love is the only religion in which there have been no heretics.  Why?  Because woman are at once its object and its priesthood.

Love, art, and religion are but different phases of the same emotion:  awe, reverence, worship, and sacrifice in the presence of the supreme ideal.

Love knows no creed.  Nay more,

Love acknowledges no deity but itself and accepts no sanctions but its own:  it is autonomous.  And yet—­

And yet, love sometimes feels constrained to offer a liturgical acquiescence to the rubric of Reason.  In short,

Between the prelatical domination of Reason and the recusant Protestantism of Love there has ever been strife.  Or, in plain language, There are two codes of ethics:  one that of the romantic heart; the other that of the practical head.  Who shall assimilate them?

The heart, in its profoundest depths, feels that something is due to Reason; and Reason, in its highest flights, feels that something is due to the heart.

Is there a divine duplicity in the human soul?  And yet, after all,

All love seeks is:  love.  Yet love little knows that

In seeking love, love enters on an endless search.  Since

Love is an endless effort to realize the Ideal.  For

Love always beckons over insurmountable barriers to uninhabitable realms; promises insupportable possibilities; lures to an unimaginable goal.  Yet

Love has a myriad counterfeits.  And

Men and women interpret the word differently.  Even

Different women interpret the word love differently.  Thus,

To one woman, love is as the rising of the sun:  it shines but once in her whole life-day; it floods everything with its light; it brightens the world; it dazzles her.