LOVE IS....

1001 ways to look at love

(of which we found 71 before breaking up)

compiled and edited by

M. Elyse Corbin and Gene C. McCoy

Preface

How many times have you asked yourself, your lover or your dearest friend, "what is love?" If you are at all like most of us you have probably said it many times, and most often the answer has probably left you more confused than before you asked the question. In this little book we have compiled 1001 ways by which men and women, in the course of the history of the written word, have attempted to define this illusive and powerful force which we are told "makes the world go around."

Since this is a collection of quotations, "and there is no new thing under the sun," we would like to preface these aphorisms, proverbs and paragraphs with some quotations which set the tone of our work and describe the enormity of the task which faces any writer who sets out to say that Love is....

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung says that "Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command and still he will involve himself in self-deceptions. If he possessess a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per ignotius - that is, by the name of God. That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfections, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error."

Any attempt to say what love is in the English language presents unique problems since in English there is only one word to express what in truth is a "many splendored thing." In Spanish, for instance, there is the verb amar, to love, and one can say to another te amo, I love you, but this is rarely done. The most common way that this sentiment is articulated between men and women is to use the verb querer, to want, by saying yo te quiero, which translates literally as I want you. Since the object of wanting is getting, this may be a more precise and honest expression of erotic love than the English I love you.

The problem of making distinctions between the different types of love has also, throughout history, been addressed by writers, and the following quotations lend insight into the magnitude of this issue:

In his book, Love and Will, Rollo May says "There are four kinds of love in Western tradition. One is sex or what we call lust, libido. The second is eros, the drive to procreate or create - the urge, as the Greeks put it, toward higher forms of being and relationship. A third is philia, or friendship, brotherly love. The fourth is agape or caritas as the Latins called it, the love which is devoted to the welfare of the other, the prototype of which is the love of God for man. Every human experience of authentic love is a blending, in varying proportions, of these four."

Dr. May's definitions of the differing types of love is all well and good, and if used by anyone afflicted by the state of "falling or being in love," it will serve as a useful antidote to the unpleasant symptoms described by Blaise Cendrars when he says:

Love is masochistic. These cries and complaints, these sweet alarms, this anguished state of lovers, this suspense, this latent pain that is just below the surface, and almost unexpressed, these thousand and one anxieties over the loved one's absence, this feeling of time rushing by, this touchiness, these fits of temper, these long daydreams, this childish fickleness of behavior, this moral torture where vanity and self esteem, or perhaps honor, upbringing and modesty are at stake, these highs and lows in the nervous tone, these leaps of the imagination, this fetishism, this cruel precision of the senses, whipping and probing, the collapse, the prostration, the abdication, the self-abasement, the perpetual loss and recovery of one's personality, these stammered words and phrases, these pet-names, this intimacy, these hesitations in physical contact, these epileptic tremors, these successive and ever more frequent relapses, this more and more turbulent and stormy passion with its ravages progressing to the point of the complete inhibition and annihilation of the soul, the debility of the senses, the exhaustion of the marrow, the erasure of the brain, and even the desiccation of the heart, this yearning for ruin, for destruction, for mutilation, this need of effusiveness, of adoration of mysticism, this insatiability which expresses itself in hyper-irritability of the mucous membranes, the errant taste, in vasomotor or peripheral disorders, and which conjures up jealousy and vengeance, crimes, prevarications and treacheries, this idolatry, this incurable melancholy, this apathy, this profound moral misery, this definitive and harrowing doubt, this despair - are not all of these stigmata the very symptoms of love in which we can first diagnose, then trace with a sure hand, the clinical curve of masochism?

However, about the time that we think that we have placed boundries on and have a grasp of this cosmos called love we find that there are still new dimensions and ramifications.

A.R. Orage in his book On love: With Some Aphorisms and Other Essays, tells us in words that are "Freely adapted from the Tibetan" that "You must learn to distinguish among at least three kinds of love (though there are seven in all): instinctive love, emotional love, and conscious love. There is not much fear that you cannot learn the first two, but the third is rare and depends upon effort as well as intellignece."

"Instinctive love," Orage says, has chemistry as its base while "Emotional love is often the mutual attraction of disaffinities and biological incongruities....The emotional lover soon becomes the object of indifference and quickly thereafter of hatred."

Finally, Orage goes on to say, is the "conscious love that rarely obtains between human beings, but can be best illustrated in the relations of man to his favorites in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. The development of the horse and dog from their original state of nature; the cultivation of flowers and fruits....are... primitive forms of conscious love" in its undeveloped, egoistic, utilitarian state. "The conscious love motive, in its developed state, is the wish that the object should arrive at its own native perfection, regardless of the consequences to the lover. 'So she become perfectly herself, what matter I?' says the conscious lover. 'I will go to hell if only she may go to heaven.'" This is just another way of saying "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

Gene McCoy

June, 1989

The Definitions

1. "Love is inviting someone into the personal recesses of one's desire. That recess is not always the other person's. A willingness to go along with the fantasy of the other is a sign of requited love, either whole or in part."

2. "Love is masochistic. These cries and complaints, these sweet alarms, this anguished state of lovers, this suspense, this latent pain that is just below the surface, and almost unexpressed, these thousand and one anxieties over the loved one's absence, this feeling of time rushing by, this touchiness, these fits of temper, these long daydreams, this childish fickleness of behavior, this moral torture where vanity and self esteem, or perhaps honor, upbringing and modesty are at stake, these highs and lows in the nervous tone, these leaps of the imagination, this fetishism, this cruel precision of the senses, whipping and probing, the collapse, the prostration, the abdication, the self-abasement, the perpetual loss and recovery of one's personality, these stammered words and phrases, these pet©names, this intimacy, these hesitations in physical contact, these epileptic tremors, these successive and ever more frequent relapses, this more and more turbulent and stormy passion with its ravages progressing to the point of the complete inhibition and annihilation of the soul, the debility of the senses, the exhaustion of the marrow, the erasure of the brain, and even the desiccation of the heart, this yearning for ruin, for destruction, for mutilation, this need of effusiveness, of adoration of mysticism, this insatiability which expresses itself in hyper-irritability of the mucous membranes, the errant taste, in vasomotor or peripheral disorders, and which conjures up jealousy and vengeance, crimes, prevarications and treacheries, this idolatry, this incurable melancholy, this apathy, this profound moral misery, this definitive and harrowing doubt, this despair - are not all of these stigmata the very symptoms of love in which we can first diagnose, then trace with a sure hand, the clinical curve of masochism?"

Blaise Cendrars - Moravagine

Pages 72-73

3. "Love is an ocean of emotion, entirely surrounded by expenses."

Lord Dewar - Best Quotations

Page 136

4. "Love is a conflict between reflexes and reflections."

Magnus Hirschfield - Sex in Human Relationship,

Best Quotations - Page 137

5. "Love is often a fruit of marriage."

Molere - Best Quotations

Page 138

6.

1. Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not Charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling symbol.

2. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

3. And though I bestow all of my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

4. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.

5. Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil.

6. Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in truth;

7. Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

8. Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies they shall fail; whether there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

9. For we know in part, and we prophecy in part.

10. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. 11. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

12. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

13. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Paul - New Testament - First Corinthians: 13

7. "Love is shared insanity."

Eduardo Fuller - Conversation on the Hampstead Heath

8. "Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error, and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd."

Shakespeare - Sonnet 116

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

Page 294

9. "Love is a boy by poets styl'd;

Then spare the rod, and spoil the child."

Samuel Butler - Hudibras, pt. iii,canto I, l. l3l3

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

Page 353

l0. "Love iz like the meazles; we kant have it bad but

onst, and the later in life we have it the tuffer

it goes with us."

Josh Billings [Henry Wheeler Shaw]

Affurisms

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

Page 685

ll. "Love is enough, though the world be a waning,

And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining."

William Morris - Love is Enough

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

Page 753

l2. "Love is a sickness full of woes,

All remedies refusing."

Samuel Daniel - Hymen's TriumphÜ

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

Page 2ll

l3. "Love is blynd."

Chaucer - The Merchant's Tale

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

Page l68

l4. "Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink."

Edna St. Vincent Millay - Love is Not All

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

Page l024

l5. "Love is a learned phenomenon, and I think the sociologists, the anthropologists, the psychologists, will tell us this with no hesitation. What worries me is that maybe many of us are not happy with the way we've learned it."

Leo Buscaglia - Love

Page l5

l6. "Love is the experience of others as 'us,' and not separately as him, her or them."

Ken Keyes, Jr. - A Conscious Person's Guide to Relationships

Page l27

l7. "Love is essentially self-communicative: those who do not have it catch it from those who have it."

Meher Baba - A Conscious Person's Guide to Relationships

Page ll8

18. "Love is the central flame of the universe, nay, the very fire itself. It is written that God is Love, and that we are his expressed likeness, the image of the Eternal Being. Love is self-givingness through creation, the impartation of the Divine through the human.

Love is an essence, an atmosphsere, which defies analysis, as does Life Itself. It is that which IS and cannot he explained: it is common to all people, to all animal life, and evident in the response of plants to those who love them. Love reigns supreme over all.

The essence of love, while elusive, pervades everything, fires the heart, stimulates the emotions,renews the soul and proclaims the Spirit. Only love knows love, and knows only love. Words cannot express its depths or meaning. A universal sense alone bears witness to the divine fact: God is Love and Love is God."

Ernest Holmes - The Science of Mind

Page 478

19. "Love is not just some great abstract idea or feeling. There are some people with such a lofty conception of love that they never succeed in expressing it in the simple kindness of ordinary life. They dream of heroic devotion and self-sacrificing service. But waiting for the opportunity which never comes, they make themselves very unlikeable to those near them, and never sense their neighbor's need.

"To love is to will good for another. Love may mean writing with enough care so that our correspondent can read without spending time deciphering; that is, it may mean taking the time to save his time. To love is to pay one's bills; it is to keep things in order so the wife's work will be made easier. It means arriving somewhere on time; it means giving your full attention to the one who is talking to you...."

Paul Tornier - The Strong and the Weak

as quoted from

The Art of Understanding Yourself

Cecil G. Osborne

Page 214

20. "Love is lonely and poetic and mysterious and whether we recognize it or not we climb into bed wrapping our identities closely around us, not knowing what we wa nt from each, and fearing both th at it might be too much and not enough. Each of us hopes to be acknowledged, succored and validated, and waits for the other to make the first move, and if we often accept an orgasm instead of what we hoped for, at some level we know the real gift is being known."

Merle Shain - Some Men Are More Perfect Than Others

Pages 28-29

2l. "Love is also a reminder of our own mortaliity. When a friend or member of our family dies, we are vividly impressed by the fact that life is evanescent and irretrievable. But there is also a deeper sense of its meaningful possibilities and an impetus to risk ourselves in taking the leap. Some-perhaps most-human beings never know deep love until they experience, at someone's death, the preciousness of friendship, devotion, loyalty. Abraham Maslow is profoundly right when he wonders whether we could love passionately if we knew we'd never die."

Rollo May - Love and Will

Page l02

22. "Love is not only enriched by our sense of mortality but constituted by it. Love is the cross- fertilization of mortality and immortality. This is why the daimon Eros is described as midway between gods and men and partakes of the nature of both."

Rollo May - Love and Will

Page l02

23. "....love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them."

Thomas Merton - No man is an Island

As quoted from One day at a time

Page 165

24. "....Love is everything."

M. Scott Peck - The Road Less Travelled

Page 22

25. "Love is the free exercise of choice. Two People love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other."

M. Scott Peck - The Road Less Travelled

Page 98

26. "Love....is a form of work or a form of courage. Specifically, it is work or courage directed toward the nurture of our own or another's spiritual growth."

M. Scott Peck - The Road Less Travelled

Page 120

27. "Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love."

William Law - as quoted by Aldous Huxley

The Perennial Philosophy

Page 81

28. "....love is the motive power behind the mind which draws it out of the world and raises it on high."

St. Gregory the Great - as quoted by Aldous Huxley

The Perennial Philosophy

Page 80

29. "Love is a mode of knowledge, and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility Where there is no disinterested love (or, more briefly, no charity), there is only biased self love, and consequently only a partial and distorted knowledge of the self and of the world of things, lives, minds and spirits outside the self."

Aldous Huxley - The Perennial Philosophy

30. "Love is for creation, and if creation is not posssible, then for procreation, and if even that is not posssible then for creation of that which, perhaps fortunately, we are unconscious. Take it, however, as the fundemental truth about love: that it always creates."

A. R. Orage - On Love: With some Aphorisms and Other Essays

As quoted in Parabola

Page 35

31. "Love is also a form of conviction. This brings to mind Nietzche, who said, "Man is the animal who can promise," which is only another way of saying "the animal who is capable of conviction."

Erich Fromm

Dialogue with Erich Fromm

Richard Evans

Page 23

32. "Love is based on an attitude of affirmation and respect, and if this attitude does not also exist toward oneself, who is after all only another human being and another neighbor, it does not exist at all. The human reality behind the concept of man's love for God in humanistic religion is man's ability to love productively, to love without greed, without submission and domination, to love from the fullness of his personality, just as God's love is a symbol of love out of strength and not out of weakness."

Erich Fromm - Psychoanalysis and Religion

Page 87

33. "Love is not getting, but giving. It is sacrifice. And sacrifice is glorious!"

Joanna Field - Each Day a New Beginning

March 12

34. "...love is a great beautifier."

Louisa May Alcott

As quoted in Each Day a New Beginning

May 3

35. "Love is a force. It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces. It is a power like money, or steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it."

Anne Morrow Lindberg

As quoted in Each Day a New Beginning

August 16

36. "Love is an ideal vehicle for addiction because it can so exclusively claim a person's consciousness. If, to serve as an addiction, something must be both reassuring and consuming, then a sexual or love relationship is perfectly suited for the task. If it must also be patterned, predictable and isolated, then in these respects, too, a relationship can be ideally tailored to the addictive purpose. Someone who is dissatisfied with himself or his situation can discover in a relationship the most encompassing substitute for self-contentment and the effort required to attain it."

Stanton Peele with Archie Brodsky

Love and Addictiion

Page 70

37. "Love is the opposite of interpersonal addiction. A love realtionship is based on a desire to grow and to expand oneself through living, and a desire for one's partner to do the same. Anything which contributes positively to a loved one's experience is welcomed, partly because it enriches the one for his own sake, and partly because it makes him a more stimulating companion in life. If a person is self-completed, he can even accept experiences which cause a lover to grow away from him, if that is the direction in which the lover's fulfillment must take her. If two people hope to realize fully their potential as human beings - both together and apart - then they create an intimacy which includes, along with trust and sharing, hope, independence, openness, adventurousness, and love."

Stanton Peele with Archie Brodsky

Love and Addictiion

Page 80

38. "...love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.

"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it; if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned."

Solomon's Song 8:6-7

39. "Love is an irresitible desire to be irrestibly desired."

Robert Frost - Comment

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

Page 930

40. "Love is the idler's occupation, the warrior's relaxation, and the sovereign's ruination."

Napoleon Bonaparte

Dictionnaire Napoleon Ed. Damas Hinard

Dictionary of Quotations Collected by Bergen Evans

Page 406

41. "Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too."

Shakespeare

As You Like It - It. III ii

Dictionary of Quotations Collected by Bergen Evans

Page 409

42. "Love is of the phoenix kind,

And burns itself with self made fire

To breed still new birds in the mind,

From ashes of the old desire."

Fulke Greville -The Phoenix Kind

Dictionary of Quotations Collected by Bergen Evans

Page 4ll

43. "Love is an egoism of two."

Antoine de La Sale

Dictionary of Quotations

Page 405

44. "Love is not the business of the idle, but the idleness of the busy."

E.G. Bulwer-Lytton

Rienzi IV

Dictionary of Quotations

Page 405

45. "Love is a circle that doth restless move In the same sweet eternity of love."

Robert Herrick 1591-1674

Love What It Is

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations

46. "Love is mor than gold or gret richesse."

The Story of Thebes - (c. l420), pt III, l.2716)

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotation

47. "Love is lame at fifty years."

Thomas Hardy - The Revisitation

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotation

48."Love is swift of foot; Love's a man of war And can shoot And hit from far."

George Herbert - Discipline

Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs

Page 120

49. "Love is a spirit all compact of fire Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire."

Shakespeare - Othello

Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs

Page 263

50. "Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies." Shakespeare - Venus and Adonis

Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs

Page 263

51. "Love is the true price of love."

Proverb As quoted in Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs

Page 397

52. "Love is full of trouble (or fear)."

Proverb As quoted in Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs

Page 397

53. "Love is never without jealousy."

Proverb As quoted in Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs

Page 397

54. "Love is not found in the market."

Proverb As quoted in Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs

Page 397

55. "Love is sweet in the beginning but sour in the ending."

Proverb As quoted in Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs

Page 397

56. "Love is the loadstone of love."

Proverb As quoted in Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs Page 397

57. "Love is the only way to our human destiny and to the feet of God, who is Love."

John Powell - Why anm I afraid to love?

Page 120

58. "Love is a state of being, it is an experience, it is a commitment and it is a relation."

Sidney M. Jourard - The Transparent Self

Page 50

59. "Love is a balm that contains the power of healing and of renewing and of everlasting life within its effulgent essence. Love is the great refiner and beautifier. Love is more! Love is the key to every door. It is the creative reality behind every righteous desire and every ardent hope. Love is the cohesive power of the universe as it binds together atoms and substances. It holds families together - the world and the entire universe. If love were withdrawn all things would fall apart and disintegrate. When a human being eliminates love from his life he too begins to fall apart. Love is not only eternal but it is the most desirable element to possess."

Frank S. Mead, ed. - The Encyclopedia of Religious Quotes

Page 222

60. "Love is the breath of life in all things, even down to the cells and atoms of our physical bodies. We are made of love and love is our destiny. Love is the power of creation; without it there could be no growth or existence."

Robert Scheid - Beyond the Love Game

Page 65

61. "Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky before the sun came out.....You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it puts into everything. Without love you would not be happy or want to play."

Annie Sullivan to Helen Keller

Helen Keller's Story of My Life Pages 40-41 - as quoted by Robert Scheid Beyond the Love Game

Page 65

62. "Love is also the promise of dreams come true. Love has the power to bring any noble and honest desire into physical reality. Any hope which is right for that individual - if visualized and surrounded with love and given thanks for - will have no choice but to come true".

Robert Scheid - Beyond the Love Game

Page 67

63. "Love is intellegence. It is not necessary to control love or to tell it what to do. Our task is to send it out, and let it do its precious work. For love brings harmony and perfection into any situation it touches."

Robert Scheid - Beyond the Love Game

Page 67

64. "Love is the key; love is the healer. It is not true, as some 'authorities' claim that love hurts or destroys. That kind of so clled love is only the emotional attachment to something in the subconscious mind, it is not love. Real love can clear the mind and help straighten out the messes in one's life, or it can heal and energize the body. It can heal all imagined or real hurts, and it can help one to become more sensitive and aware."

Robert Scheid - Beyond the Love Game

Page 67

65. "(Just as) love is the foundation upon which our universe operates, so is forgiveness. Being able to forgive includes looking past the physical and mental weaknesses into the heart of the individual, and letting go of any wrongs, real and imagined, that he or she may have done, then blessing that individual by truly desiring what is right and true for that individual. Through forgiveness the power of love is released in one's life. Forgiveness becomes easy when we love, and only becomes difficult when we let our emotions and intellects interfere."

Robert Scheid - Beyond the Love Game

Page 74

66. Love is always unique, one of a kind. ("Sex" can be an often is specialized and standardized.) Love is eternally surprising. ("Sex strives for reliability predictability.) "Impersonal love" is a contradiction in terms. ("Sex" is essentially impersonal.) Love is not abstract but experiential, not general but simultaneously specific and universal. Ultimately, neither discourse nor dogma can bind it, for it is the stuff of creation itself, and thus a clear and present danger to every established order. ("Sex" is a product of abstract, generalizing intellect.)

George Leonard - The end of sex

Pages 105-106

67. "Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in amoment, it will not be created in years or even generations."

Kahlil Gibran - The Broken Wings

Page 23

68. "....love is not created by us, but is sent from above and directs everything the way it pleases." Kahlil Gibran: The Nature of Love

Page 37

69. "Love is the source of everything; in its presence everything is beauty; in its absence the whole world is an ugly mask."

Kahlil Gibran: The Nature of Love

Page 48

70. "Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love."

Ayn Rand - The Virtue of Selfishness

Page 44

71. "Love is an infusion of intense feeling, a fine madness that makes you drunk, and when one is in love, life can be a succession of freefalls while working without a net. Love permits the lover to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations, and because one is never so alive as when one is in love, and never so full of power, there are people hooked on love who wouldn't consider taking drugs."

Merle Shain - Some Men Are More Perfect Than Others

Page 13

* * * * *

Gene McCoy © July 1998

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