“Like love we don't know where or whyLike love we cant compel or flyLike Love we often weepLike Love we seldom keep”

“We must love one another or die”

“How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return?If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.”

“There is no such thing as the StateAnd no one exists alone;Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.”

“Portia we can admire because, having seen her leave her Earthly Paradise to do a good deed in this world (one notices, incidentally, that in this world she appears in disguise), we know that she is aware of her wealth as a moral responsibility, but the other inhabitants of Belmont, Bassanio, Gratiano, Lorenzo and Jessica, for all their beauty and charm, appear as frivolous members of a leisure class, whose carefree life is parasitic upon the labors of others, including usurers. When we learn that Jessica has spent fourscore ducats of her father’s money in an evening and bought a monkey with her mother’s ring, we cannot take this as a comic punishment for Shylock’s sin of avarice; her behavior seems rather an example of the opposite sin of conspicuous waste. Then, with the example in our minds of self-sacrificing love as displayed by Antonio, while we can enjoy the verbal felicity of the love duet between Lorenzo and Jessica, we cannot help noticing that the pairs of lovers they recall, Troilus and Cressida, Aeneas and Dido, Jason and Medea, are none of them examples of self-sacrifice or fidelity. […] Belmont would like to believe that men and women are either good or bad by nature, but Antonio and Shylock remind us that this is an illusion; in the real world, no hatred is totally without justification, no love totally innocent.”

“The More Loving OneLooking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast.How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return?If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.Admirer as I think I amOf stars that do not give a damn,I cannot, now I see them, sayI missed one terribly all day.Were all stars to disappear or die,I should learn to look at an empty skyAnd feel its total dark sublime,Though this might take me a little time.”

“Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both partners run out of goods.But if the seed of a genuine disinterested love, which is often present, is ever to develop, it is essential that we pretend to ourselves and to others that it is stronger and more developed than it is, that we are less selfish than we are. Hence the social havoc wrought by the paranoid to whom the thought of indifference is so intolerable that he divides others into two classes, those who love him for himself alone and those who hate him for the same reason.Do a paranoid a favor, like paying his hotel bill in a foreign city when his monthly check has not yet arrived, and he will take this as an expression of personal affection – the thought that you might have done it from a general sense of duty towards a fellow countryman in distress will never occur to him. So back he comes for more until your patience is exhausted, there is a row, and he departs convinced that you are his personal enemy. In this he is right to the extent that it is difficult not to hate a person who reveals to you so clearly how little you love others.”