A temporary insanity curable by marriage. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.Īmbrose Bierce, with the characteristic wryness of The Devil’s Dictionary: Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: It’s just a little while, and then it burns away… Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality. Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. Except love.Ĭharles Bukowski, who also famously deemed love “a dog from hell,” in this archival video interview: Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Susan Sontag, whose illustrated insights on love were among last year’s most read and shared articles, in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980: Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby - awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess. Lemony Snicket in Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid: The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. It will not be broken it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries avoid all entanglements lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. Lewis, who was a very wise man, in The Four Loves: Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. Stendhal in his fantastic 1822 treatise on love: What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is. Kurt Vonnegut, who was in some ways an extremist about love but also had a healthy dose of irreverence about it, in The Sirens of Titan:Ī purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.Īnaïs Nin, whose wisdom on love knew no bounds, in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953: Gathered here are some of the most memorable and timeless insights on love, culled from several hundred years of literary history - enjoy. After those collections of notable definitions of art, science, and philosophy, here comes a selection of poetic definitions of a peculiar phenomenon that is at once more amorphous than art, more single-minded than science, and more philosophical than philosophy itself.
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