Relationships and Family

Your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.

Ah, love, let us be true / To one another! for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

To find oneself jilted is a blow to one’s pride. One must do one’s best to forget it and if one doesn’t succeed, at least one must pretend to.

Oh, what a power is motherhood, possessing / A potent spell. All women alike / Fight fiercely for a child.

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.

It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.

Love is not always blind and there are few things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love.

If there’s delight in love, 'tis when I see / That heart which others bleed for, bleed for me.

My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year- old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

Jealousy’s a proof of love, / But ’tis a weak and unavailing medicine; / It puts out the disease and makes it show, / But has no power to cure.

Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.

Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.

He injures a fair lady that beholds her not.

O, if thou car'st not whom I love / Alas, thou lov’st not me.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

With him for a sire and her for a dam, / What should I be but just what I am?

Deep in the cavern of the infant’s breast / The father’s nature lurks, and lives anew.

We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; / Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so.

In a brief space the generations of living beings are changed and like runners pass on the torches of life.

Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,— / Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; / Another race the following spring supplies: / They fall successive, and successive rise.

Only mothers can think of the future—because they give birth to it in their children.