Is There any Pleasure to Compare with Eros?
[By eros is meant the state of “being in love,” a state where sexual or romantic infatuation is a necessary but not sufficient condition.]
The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of the importance of the inner element in experience. If it comes, it comes; if it does not
come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the
creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms a landscape from a corpselike grey to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune
for the lover and gives a new direction to his life.
William James
I have every reason to love you. What I lack is the unreason.
Robert Mallet
When rationalism makes people sceptical of all absolutes, their incurable
romanticism leads them to idealise their finer emotions. Thus, in materialistic societies sex passes beyond its natural function and becomes an outlet
for all the unsatisfied cravings of the psychic life. But the romantic idealisation of sexual passion fails as completely as the rationalist attempt to reduce
it to a mere appetite.
Christopher Dawson
He [Bertrand Russell] was enough of a puritan and a very conscious intellectual to have to explain to himself every sexual call of nature as a fated invitation to a mystical union of souls, an incurable form of rationalization that got
him into perpetual trouble.
Alistair Cooke (speaking of his friend Russell)
[The following is from Bertrand Russell’s autobiography and concerns events
in 1911 when Russell’s first marriage was breaking up.]
The [aesthetic] atmosphere of Ottoline’s house fed something in me that had
been starved throughout the years of my first marriage. As soon as I entered
it, I felt rested from the rasping difficulties of the outer world. When I arrived there on March 19th, on my way to Paris, I found that Philip [Ottoline’s husband] had unexpectedly had to go to Burnley [Philip’s constituency], so that I was left tête-a-tête with Ottoline. During dinner we made conversation about Burnley, and politics, and the sins of the Government. After
dinner the conversation gradually became more intimate. Making timid
approaches, I found them to my surprise not repulsed. It had not, until this
moment, occurred to me that Ottoline was a woman who would allow me to
make love to her, but gradually, as the evening progressed, the desire to
make love to her became more and more insistent. At last it conquered, and
I found to my amazement that I loved her deeply, and that she returned my
feeling... For external and accidental reasons, I did not have full relations
with Ottoline that evening, but we agreed to become lovers as soon as possible. My feeling was overwhelmingly strong, and I did not care what might
be involved. I wanted to leave Alys [his wife], and to have [Ottoline] leave
Philip. What Philip might think or feel was a matter of indifference to me. If
I had known that he would murder us both (as Mrs. Whitehead assured me
he would) I should have been willing to pay that price for one night.Bertrand Russell
We must not give unconditional obedience to the voice of Eros even when
he speaks like a god. But neither must we ignore or attempt to deny the
god-like quality.
C. S. Lewis
Freud and his followers considered emotional energy to be specifically sexual in nature. According to this hypothesis the only really authentic form of
emotional communication between people would be sexual love. Jung, on
the other hand, had a much truer view of the matter. Emotional energy is
essentially undifferentiated and can be put to different uses by the will provided circumstances allow.
Fr. Ignace Lepp (psychotherapist)
Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into
friendship.
Lord Byron
[Hesketh Pearson was a British writer whose biographies sold well in the
1930s and ‘40s.]
Throughout the Thirties what Pearson called ‘the most vital part of my life’
was a dark, vivacious Jewish actress named Dorothy Dunkels. She was nearly twenty years younger than he and, because of that, he at first avoided
sexual intimacy. But after six weeks of ‘a gradually weakening resistance’
they became lovers and remained intermittently so for nine years. ‘Fascinating, infuriating, seductive, aloof, shameless, sensitive, cruel, tender: she
could play all the emotional notes in quick succession, and leave me quivering with lust or quiescent with love or tingling with admiration or coldly
critical.’
Gladys [Pearson’s wife] could no more help making scenes over Hesketh’s infidelities then he could help repeating them. She eventually found
out about Dorothy which led to ‘agonizing emotional scenes’ when Hesketh
swore that he would break it off. There followed the cowardly letters trying
to rupture from a distance what one wishes only to nurture when together;
the feeling of utter emptiness when all the lights seem to have gone out and
only one person can illuminate the darkness; the desolating loneliness in
which he would see her or telephone her or write to her once again, and the
cycle would start over. Although capable of decisiveness (as his military
record attests) he was irresolute when at the mercy of sensuality. Like many
men, when lust was in the ascendancy, common sense flew out of the window.
Richard Ingrams
To be always with a woman and not to have intercourse with her is more
difficult than to raise the dead.
St Bernard of Clairvaux
The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as
intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has
overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests
of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we
have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. Simply to relapse from it, merely to “fall out of” love again is—if I
may coin the ugly word—a sort of disredemption.
C. S. Lewis
Love is what we call the situation which occurs when two people who are
sexually compatible discover that they can also tolerate one another in various other circumstances.
Marc Maihueird
Both young men [Christopher Dawson and Edward Watkin]...were seekers
of beauty, truth and knowledge... After a long discussion they had about
love which took place during a visit to Christoper’s home in 1911, Edward
Watkin wrote: ‘We agreed that it (mutual attraction) had been a matter very
much neglected by thinkers. Plato and Schopenhauer alone seem to have
dealt with it. We were reluctantly obliged, I at least was most reluctant to
admit that the basis of love was always physical.’
Christina Scott (biographer)
To our bodies turn we then, that so / Weak men on love reveal’d may look; /
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, / But yet the body is his book.
John Donne
Thoughts about Eros
Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.
Oliver Goldsmith
To love is to suffer, to be loved is to cause suffering.
Countess Diane
In how many lives does love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of a ‘grand passion’ than of a grand opera.
Israel Zangwill
True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.
de La Rochefoucauld
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
George Bernard Shaw
We must not ridicule a passion which he who never felt was never happy,
and he who laughs at never deserves to feel.
Samuel Johnson
Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
H. L. Mencken
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind / And therefore is winged
Cupid painted blind.
Midsummer Night’s Dream (Helena)
Around my love there is always a mystery: why, in a world that seems to
make so little sense otherwise, did something so inevitably right happen?
Northrop Frye
O, how this spring of love resembleth / The uncertain glory of an April day, /
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun, / And by and by a cloud takes
all away!
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Proteus)
Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down
your house, you can never tell.
Joan Crawford
She who would long retain her power must use her lover ill.
Ovid
Women should never show a man that she loves him too much... Indifference is the great stimulus of love.
Fidel Castro
Sudden love takes the longest time to be cured.
La Bruyère
The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other
than for the desire of the man.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
They that marry where they do not love, will love where they do not marry.
Thomas Fuller
On the whole women tend to love men for their character while men tend to
love women for their appearance. In this respect, it must be said, men show
themselves the inferiors of women, for the qualities that men find pleasing in
women are on the whole less desirable than those that women find pleasing
in men.
Bertrand Russell
The pleasure of love is loving, and we get more happiness from the passion
we feel than from the passion we inspire.
La Rochefoucauld
They do not love that do not show their love.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
He who loves without jealousy does not truly love.
The Zohar, 13th century
To put it in a rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on
our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage.
M. Scott Peck
Eros may unite the most unsuitable partners; many unhappy, and predictably unhappy, marriages were love-matches.
C. S. Lewis
When love grows diseased, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent
death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingering and consumptive passion.
George Etherege