“Perfect love is rare indeed — for to be a lover will require that you continually have the subtlety of the very wise, the flexibility of the child, the sensitivity of the artist, the understanding of the philosopher, the acceptance of the saint, the tolerance of the scholar and the fortitude of the certain.”
pp 198-199
LOVE (1972)
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Leo Buscaglia 84
Motivational speaker, writer 1924–1998Related quotes
Entry (1960)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: How rare it is to come across a piece of writing that is unambiguous, unqualified, and also unblurred by understatements or subtleties, and yet at the same time urbane and tolerant. It is a vice of the scientific method when applied to human affairs that it fosters hemming and hawing and a scrupulousness that easily degenerates into obscurity and meaninglessness.
“To be gentle, tolerant, wise and reasonable requires a goodly portion of toughness.”
As quoted in Who Said That? (1984) by Renie Gee.
“To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.”
The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate (1908)
1900s
Source: The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
“The longer the road to love, the keener is the pleasure to be experienced by the sensitive lover.”
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving
“To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness”
"Fifth Talk in The Oak Grove, 11 June 1944" http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=173&chid=4529&w=%22To+understand+oneself+requires+patience%22&s=Text, J. Krishnamurti Online, JKO Serial No. 440611, Vol. III, p. 219
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works
Context: To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.
The Great Indian Novel
Variant: A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.
“A wise lover values not so much the gift of the lover as the love of the giver.”
Source: The Imitation of Christ
Un chagrin de passage (1994, A Fleeting Sorrow, translated 1995)