Wijsheid van George MacDonald:
"The man who thoroughly loves God and his neighbor is the only man who will love a woman ideally - who can love her with the love God thought of between them when he made man male and female. The man, I repeat, who loves God with his very life, and his neighbour, as Christ loves him, is the man who alone is capable of grand, perfect, glorious love to any woman."
It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another."
Phantastes., Chapter 23
"Love without religion is the plucked rose. Religion without love--there is no such thing. Religion is the bush that bears all the roses; for religion is the natural condition of man in relation to the eternal facts, that is, the truths, of his own being. To live is to love; there is no life but love. What shape the love puts on, depends on the persons between whom is the relation. The poorest love with religion, is better, because truer, therefore more lasting, more genuine, more endowed with the possibility of persistence--that is, of infinite development, than the most passionate devotion between man and woman without it."
What's Mine's Mine, p. 202/3