Words from Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese thinker and poet:
"We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It is our own concept - our own selves - that we ultimately love.
This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he is the perfect logical expression of the lover. He is the only one who doesn't feign and doesn't fool himself.
The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say 'I love you' or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul's activity."
"We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It is our own concept - our own selves - that we ultimately love.
This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he is the perfect logical expression of the lover. He is the only one who doesn't feign and doesn't fool himself.
The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say 'I love you' or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul's activity."
