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    32 Hugs That Will Remind You That You're Not Alone In The World

    *hugs monitor*

    "There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort."

    — Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

    "So come give me a hug / if you're into getting rubbed."

    50 Cent, "In Da Club"

    Until virtual hugs are (finally) invented, these will have to suffice. Words by Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay on friendship.

    1. "We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken..."

    2. "... the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether."

    3. "Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth."

    4. "From the highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of good-will, they make the sweetness of life."

    5. "Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection."

    6. "What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling?"

    7. "How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true!"

    8. "The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed...

    9. There is no winter, and no night...

    10. All tragedies, all ennuis, vanish...

    11. ... nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons."

    12. "Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend..."

    13. ... and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years."

    14. "I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new."

    15. "I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine...

    16. ... I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden."

    17. "His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less."

    18. "Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth."

    19. "I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage."

    20. "When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know."

    21. "But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance with my brother's soul...

    22. ... is the nut itself, whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell."

    23. "A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere."

    24. "When a man becomes dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune."

    25. "I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence."

    26. "It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon."

    27. "It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death."

    28. "It should never fall into something usual and settled...

    29. ... but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery."

    30. "Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party."

    31. "What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can."

    32. "The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust."

    Now: send this post to a friend who needs a hug, stat!