Happy Valentine's Day! It's a day invented by Hallmark to sell greeting cards and porcelain trinkets! If your emotions are easily swayed by anything cheaply emotional (pieces of cheap chocolate, trite poems, puppies crying, etc.), then today is your Superbowl. Because I have nothing productive to say about love, I thought I'd share some of my favorite quotes on love from the folks who have lived much more miserable lives than I. Enjoy:
C.S. Lewis:
Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.
Carl Jung:
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
I love humanity but I hate people.
Goethe:
To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.
Jimi Hendrix:
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
Jonathan Swift:
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Katharine Hepburn:
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
Lily Tomlin:
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
Mark Twain:
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Robert Frost:
Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better.
Willa Cather:
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
William Shakespeare:
Love all, trust a few.
H. L. Mencken:
Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
Sigmund Freud:
The great question... which I have not been able to answer... is, "What ..does a woman want?''
Samuel Coleridge:
The most happy marriage I can picture would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.
Lord Byron:
All tragedies are finished by a death, all comedies by a marriage.
George Burns:
Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means.
Leonard Cohen:
Maybe there's a God above, but all I've ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya.
Voltaire:
Love has features which pierce all hearts, he wears a bandage which conceals the faults of those beloved. He has wings, he comes quickly and flies away the same.
Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes):
Girls are like slugs - they probably serve some purpose, but it's hard to imagine what.
Chaucer:
By nature, men love newfangledness.
Bill Clinton:
Politics gives guys so much power that they tend to behave badly around women. And I hope I never get into that.
Dave Barry:
If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
William Shakespeare:
Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
Woody Allen:
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.
Be careful out there,
Chris
5 comments:
Hey Chris, what did you think of Dave Chappelle's interview by James Lipton? It was the best Inside the Actor's Studio I ever saw, and I've got it on tape if you missed it. A few more on love and people, on conspiring with someone else to return oneself to an infantile state where one's helplessness and dependence entitles one to be nurtured, protected and cared for:
"The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children." -Clarence Darrow
"Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old." -John Ciardi
"Love may arise from a generous sentiment--namely, the liking for prostitution; but it soon becomes corrupted by the liking for ownership." -Charles Baudelaire
"The reason that lovers never weary each other is because they are always talking about themselves." -François de la Rochefoucauld
"Boy Meets Girl, So What?" -Bertolt Brecht
"If I return people's greetings, I do so only to give them their greeting back." -Karl Kraus
"Love: a burnt match skating in a urinal." -Hart Crane
"Love is two minutes fifty-two second of squishing noises. It shows your mind isn't clicking right." -Johnny Rotten
"Just like my mother, I called every possessive, overprotective thing I did 'love'...The first thing it can be said a mother honestly feels in relation to her child is a kind of self-love. The child is essentially a narcissistic extension of herself...Sometimes I wonder what kind of model Mary makes for our daughters, but it can't be far from how we perceive the sexual image of our mothers: certainly she did it with our father, but from what we know of her, we can't imagine for a minute that she enjoyed it." -Nancy Friday
"Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients." -Karl Kraus
"The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not." -George Bernard Shaw
"Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure." -Karl Kraus
"As a creatrix, woman addresses an inescapable challenge to man to justify his existence. She gives birth to meaning out of her body. Biology alone assures her of a destiny, of making a significant contribution to the ongoing drama of life. A man responds to her challenge by simulating creation, by making, fabricating, and inventing artifacts. But while she creates naturally and literally, he creates only artificially and metaphorically. She creates from her corpus; he invents a 'corporation,' a fictitious legal body with endowed rights of a natural person. Her creation sustains the eternal cycle of nature. Each of his artifacts contributes to making history a series of unrepeatable events. (Sometimes I imagine that the hidden intent of technology is to make a perfect mechanical baby--an automobile, a machine that moves by itself, is capable of perpetual motion, is fed its daily bottle of petroleum, and has its pollution diapered.) In response to the power of the goddess, man creates himself in the image of a god he imagines has fabricated the world like a craftsman working with a blueprint to shape matter into meaningful objects. Much of the meaning men attribute to their work is a response to the question posed to us by woman's capacity to give life." -Sam Keen
"Psychoanalysts are father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the fathers as well." -Karl Kraus
"We do not so often disappoint others as ourselves. We not only think more highly than others of our own abilities, but allow ourselves to form hopes which we never communicate, and please our thoughts with employments which none ever will allot us, and with elevations to which we are never expected to rise; and when our days and years have passed away in common business or common amusements, and we find at last that we have suffered our purposes to sleep till the time of action is past, we are reproached only by our own reflections; neither our friends nor our enemies wonder that we live and die like the rest of mankind, that we live without notice and die without memorial; they know not what task we had proposed, and therefore cannot discern whether it is finished." -Samuel Johnson
You forgot my favorite:
"I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear." - Oprah
ps. look i got a blog too
Hi Chris. It's Josh Burgess. I saw the comment you left on my blog...what two months ago? Anyway, hope things are going well. We need to catch up on life after Oxford. What's your e-mail address? And I'll leave you with my favourite love quote from the great Charlie Brown: "Nothing takes the taste our of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."
Ross: you are a bad man. You have read even more than I have lied about reading. I missed Chappelle, though...what can I do?
Josh: you are a good man. Hook me up: fourmanfront@gmail.com
I can't wait to hear from your crazy, conservative butt.
Mike: you are barely a man.
Thank you, and goodnight.
I made a tape, so no worries. Man, what are you doing this month? When you've got a free weekend, I oughta just come down there. I'd like to see my friend Barclay too, but he's real busy and keeps backing out on me. So let's just make some plans. You got drums down there or do I have to bring 'em? Holler back Breaker come on back son.
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