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Love is not exactly a sacrifice; it is an exchange. The lover, indeed, gives his heart; he expects another in return.
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Love is like life: no apparatus can manufacture it; kill it, and nothing in the heavens above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will resuscitate it.
How many a forlorn human wight has tried to resuscitate love!
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To such heights does love exalt the lover that he or she will live for days in the remembered delights of a look, a word, a gesture. But
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.
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