3.31.2013

What is Love? Words of Wisdom from 200 Years of Literary History

C. S. Lewis, who was a very wise man, in The Four Loves:
"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

Katharine Hepburn in Me : Stories of My Life:
"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything."

Philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, he of great wisdom, in The Conquest of Happiness:
"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."


Honoré de Balzac, who knew a thing or two about all-consuming love, in Physiologie Du Mariage:
"The more one judges, the less one loves."

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