Everybody knows what love is, yet can also find more about it to learn, to discover, and experience — everyday. Throughout time, humans have known that love is among the most sacred and yet controversial elements of our existence.
These quotes deal with the inspiring and elusive truths about love. I offer a few words about how to integrate them into our worldview.
1. “Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.” -Marcel Proust
Love is an ideal. The necessary conclusion is that in some way, it falls short of reality. We love others despite their flaws. This is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. Part of understanding and accepting love is this awareness that it is mainly inspired by reality, but it is not identical to it. A good portion of love is internal: it comes from within.
Objective reality may have relatively little to do with true love, in the end. So much of what we love about a person is derived from our own preconceived values and the projections of our individual imagination. This is why love is such a personal, subjective thing.
2. “Physics isn’t the most important thing. Love is.” -Richard Feynman
Feynman won the Nobel Prize for Physics. He is considered among the greatest and most influential scientists of the modern world. Yet he was able to see the supreme value of love, even over that of his so praised area of monumental achievement — his life’s work.
Love is something all people can appreciate, regardless of how scientific and objective their intellect may be. Also, this is evidence that we can maintain our rational mind on the one hand, while embracing the more irrational aspects of love on the other.
3. “Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.” -Soren Kierkegaard
Existentialist philosopher Kierkegaard nailed the risk vs. reward aspects of love. It is risky — you have everything to lose and everything to gain. There is a fine line to tread in pursuing romance. You could get awfully hurt, or you could end up happy for the rest of your life. Taking that risk is part of the deal.
We cannot expect to look for love without accepting some element of threat. In these ways, it can be compared to danger and thrill-seeking in our lives. We want the endorphin rush, the high, but it comes at a price. Otherwise, there is no excitement. Love is about vulnerability.
4. “It’s impossible to really understand someone[…]and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them…I destroy them.” -Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
The protagonist that Orson Scott Card created was a messiah-like figure. He was known for his natural leadership skills and strategic acumen. Another layer to his abilities showed his advanced wisdom and compassion. Love is about understanding other people.
This quote makes us think of how it’s possible to love our enemies. We get inside of their heart, see who they are the way they see themselves, so that we can fathom their every action and thought. This also makes me think of so many romantic relationships, where there is enmity.
In such cases, one lover can see the other clearly, they know their lover so well, that it is almost as if they were that person— and yet they can see what is wrong with them, with an outside sense of perspective. Love can indeed be paradoxical.
5. “I’ve made the most important discovery of my life. It’s only in the mysterious equation of love that any logical reasons can be found.” -John Nash
Nash is another Nobel prize winner to cite love as a supreme ideal. He was famous for modeling aspects of nature and civilization in new, mathematical ways. His struggles with mental illness were punctuated by a troubled but ultimately enduring relationship with his wife.
It’s inspiring for the rest of us, that even though we may not be able to understand Nash’s complicated equations, what he considers his most important discovery is something so beautiful and simple. When our world is confusing and overwhelming, only love itself makes any real sense.
6. “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.” -John Keats
Poets are known for being preoccupied with love. Keats elevates love among the highest values, also associated with the imagination, and truth itself. This brings to mind the first quote from Proust, who suggests that love is disconnected from reality.
Keats’ truth of imagination, alongside the holiness of the heart’s affections, clarifies that imagination is for us even more true than reality. The outside world doesn’t matter so much when the heart and mind are involved. If we can feel something, it is sacred — and if we can see something in our mind’s eye, it becomes real to us.
7. “Love loves to love love.” -James Joyce
A master of wordplay and linguistic invention, Joyce reminds us with this succinct quote that love seeks more love. We love other people who are also loving. We are more likely to fall and stay in love with people who love us in return. Love is always hungry for more love, it is a verb and a noun, and pulls heavy weight in the world of words, ideas, and emotions.
8. “Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.” -Emily Dickinson
Dickinson was an amazing poet whose pieces were beautiful, concise, and true. This quote makes us think about how love always lives on in others, after a person who is loved has died in their bodily form. One cannot really see an end to this circuit.
To equate love with immortality reminds us that life doesn’t really have much meaning without love. We will be better to search for love from others than to try to look for the delusion of immortality in our selfishness.
Final Thoughts
I think this sampling of quotes does a good job of covering the huge spectrum suggested by love. There are many varieties of love — of which erotic love is but one, all offshoots of an essential quality that runs like a figured bass through all of humanity. Love is truly the most powerful force that we as humans know.
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Previously Published on medium
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