Dear Reader, We wouldn’t need books quite so much if everyone around us understood us well. But they don’t. Even those who love us get us wrong. They… - Maria Popova

It takes rare courage to recognize that feelings are the most perishable of our possessions, even more so than opinions, for an opinion — that is, a real opinion, which is qualitatively different than a fleeting impression or a borrowed stance — is arrived at via a well-reasoned argument with oneself. Not so a feeling — feelings coalesce out of the vapors that escape from the deepest groundwaters of our unreasoned and unreasonable being, and whatever rainbows they may scatter for a moment when touched with the light of another, they diffuse and evaporate just as readily, just as mysteriously.
Love, Margaret implies in her letter to Sam, is never to be taken for granted — it is to be met moment by moment, on its ever-changing terms.

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe….We’re challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery — not of nature, but of ourselves.

Like any currency of value, the human imagination is a coin with two inseparable sides. It is our faculty of fancy that fills the disquieting gaps of the unknown with the tranquilizing certitudes of myth and superstition, that points to magic and witchcraft when common sense and reason fail to unveil causality. But that selfsame faculty is also what leads us to rise above accepted facts, above the limits of the possible established by custom and convention, and reach for new summits on the degree of courage, determined by some incalculable combination of nature, culture, and character.