To love someone means to see him as God intended him.
Attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky; really Marina Tsvetaeva
Misattributed Someone else said or wrote it.Draft entry, not yet reviewed
Where it really comes from
Marina Tsvetaeva, in her diary notes on love (1918): «Любить — видеть человека таким, каким его задумал Бог и не осуществили родители. Не любить — видеть человека таким, каким его осуществили родители. Разлюбить — видеть вместо него: стол, стул.» ('To love is to see a person as God conceived him and his parents did not achieve him. Not to love is to see a person as his parents achieved him. To fall out of love is to see, in his place, a table, a chair.') Searches of the Russian texts for «каким его задумал Бог» and of the English for 'as God intended' find nothing.
Where it circulates
Circulates on quote sites, cards and wedding posts under Dostoevsky's name, with no work or date. It is not in his novels, the Diary, the Pushkin speech or the letters in the source texts. It is the first half of a diary note by the poet Marina Tsvetaeva.
What it says
To love a person is to see the best self they were meant to be, not only the self they are.
How it is misread
The popular form drops Tsvetaeva's second clause, 'and his parents failed to make him', and her two follow-up sentences. Those turn a pious maxim into a sharp, ironic aphorism about falling in and out of love.
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Nearby
- Loving someone means giving them power to destroy you and trusting they won't. alike 74%
- The price of loving someone very much is never loving anyone again. alike 53%
- Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. alike 53%
- Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him. alike 53%
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