On love

Love of Life

Attachment to life is attachment to sorrow. We love what gives us pain. Such is our nature.
Nisargadatta Maharaj

Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Now man loves life. And that's how it comes about.
Kirillov

Love of oneself

There is no affection like that for oneself...
Buddha

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love.
This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself.
Pessoa

He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful.
Anthony Powell

Of all the affections the love of oneself comes first. Your love of the world is the reflection of your love of yourself, for your world is of your own creation.

All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are expressions of your longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well.
Q: I know that I should not…
M: Wait! Who told you that you should not? What is wrong with wanting to be happy?
Q: The self must go, l know.
M: But the self is there. Your desires are there. Your longing to be happy is there. Why? Because you love yourself. By all means love yourself — wisely. What is wrong is to love yourself stupidly, so as to make yourself suffer. Love yourself wisely. Both indulgence and austerity have the same purpose in view — to make you happy. Indulgence is the stupid way, austerity is the wise way.
Q: What is austerity?
M: Once you have gone through an experience, not to go through it again is austerity. To eschew the unnecessary is austerity. Not to anticipate pleasure or pain Is austerity. Having things under control at all times is austerity. Desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience.
It is the choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing — food. sex, power, fame — will make you happy is to deceive yourself. (...)
Do not pretend that you love others as yourself. Unless you have realised them as one with yourself, you cannot love them Don't pretend to be what you are not, don't refuse to be what you are. Your love of others is the result of self-knowledge, not its cause. Without self-realisation, no virtue is genuine. When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realise the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection. But when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self-realisation can break it. Go for it resolutely.
Nisargadatta Maharaj

When, therefore, the question ‘What should I do?’ arises,w the choice is not between being selfish and being unselfish; for whatever I do I cannot avoid being selfish—all action is selfish. The choice is between being selfish in Schweitzer’s way—by unselfish devotion to the welfare of others—and being selfish in the Buddha’s way—

The welfare of oneself should not be neglected for the welfare of others, however great; recognizing the welfare of oneself, one should be devoted to one’s own welfare.
(Dhammapada 166)

How are we to choose between these two ways of being selfish? The answer is: ‘choose the way of being selfish that leads to the ending of being selfish; which is the Buddha’s way, not Schweitzer’s’.
Nanavira Thera

Sexual Love

Absurdity

The absurdity of love is that it assumes the very separateness it is its nature to wish to unite.
Nanamoli Thera

Love demands identification with something different, which isn’t even possible in logic, much less in real life. Love wants to possess. It wants to make into its own that which must remain outside it; otherwise the distinction between what it is in itself and what it makes into itself will be lost. Love is surrender. The greater the surrender, the greater the love. But total surrender also surrenders its consciousness of the other. The greatest love is therefore death, or forgetting, or renunciation – all forms of love that make love an absurdity.

Love wants to possess, but it doesn’t know what possession is. If I’m not my own, how can I be yours, or you mine? If I don’t possess my own being, how can I possess an extraneous being? If I’m even different from my own identical self, how can I be identical to a completely different self?
Pessoa

Certainly in sexual love we do seem to experience eternity; and this is often taken as religiously significant (by the Hindus, for example, with their Shivalingam, not to mention their temple eroticism).

But what a derisory eternity it is that lasts for a few seconds or minutes and then leaves us wondering what all the fuss was about! As the rude rhyme puts it bluntly:

Cold as the hair on a polar bear’s bum,
Cold as the love of a man when he’s come.

As an advertisement for eternity, sex is a joke. In romantic love, true, we manage to live in a kind of eternity for months and perhaps years: every love-affair lasts forever—while it lasts. But, all the same, when Jouhandeau (quoted by Palinurus in The Unquiet Grave) asks ‘Quand l’univers considère avec indifférence l’être que nous aimons, qui est dans la vérité?’,[ ‘When the universe considers with indifference the being whom we love, who is in truth?’] we have to answer ‘l’univers’. Our past loves can be absolutely dead, even when we meet the loved one again (Darley and Justine in Clea, for example), and it is usually only in favour of the present beloved (if any) that we dissent from the universe’s verdict. And so with aesthetic enjoyment. The transcendental sense of Mozart’s G Minor Quintet, his Adagio and Fugue, the late Beethoven, Bartok’s quartets, Stravinsky’s Octet for Wind Instruments, so evident to me before I joined the army—where was it when I got back home after the war?

Nanavira Thera

A passionate woman, who finds life empty and meaningless when she is not emotionally engaged [in love, or perhaps hate], and fearing the comic as destructive of her passion, may weep at the very contradiction that provokes laughter in a man who has, perhaps, discovered the ghastly boredom of being loved without loving in return ...

Nanavira Thera

Love: The desparateness of separation.
Hate: The desparateness of association.

Christ taught not only love but said ‘I bring not peace but a sword…’ Love is perhaps a good bowl to store hate in.

The love/hate opposition is misleading and not true to facts. Better would be love/fear and greed/ hate. Or perhaps better a triangle which is constantly being forced into a duality by identifying one of the pairs: that is what makes the world go round, no doubt. Trying to make an axis out of a try-angle by axing one angle on trial.

Mourning the loss of someone we love is happiness compared with having to live with someone we hate.

LA BRUYERE

Both hell and love are symbolized by fire—the ‘fires of hell,’ etc, and St. John of the Cross’ ‘living flame of Love,’ for example.

Now there seem to be only two ways of treating a loved thing when confronted with it: either one can unite with it, say, eat it (in which case one has annihilated it, and so lost it) or one can contemplate it and so maintain one’s love unsatisfied, in which case the outlook is perpetual unsatisfiedness (through separation) or supervening boredom (due to change in oneself or the object) turning may be to hate or to forgetting.

“Eternal love” and “selfless love” are both equivocations, and utraquisms—that an unstable state can remain unchanged eternally or that self can be eliminated and love retained. (I can set myself before or after yourself, but that is not to say that I preserve or annihilate myself before the world.)

Nanamoli Thera

Love—what Baudelaire had called ‘that terrible game in which one of the players loses self-control’.

Nothing occasions this weariness (of life) more than the return of love. The first love, it is rightly said, is the only one, for with the second, and by the second, the highest sense of love is already lost. The conception of the eternal and the infinite, which elevates and supports it, is destroyed, and it appears transient like everything else that recurs.

Goethe

The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
DISRAELI

At the beginning of love and at its end the lovers are em-barrassed to be left alone.
LA BRUYERE

Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves a dark house and a 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

Coition is a slight attack of apoplexy.
DEMOCRITUS OF ABDERA

What they call "heart" is located far lower than the fourth waistcoat button.
LICHTENBERG

Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.
ORTEGA Y ASSET

Were it not for imagination, sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.
DR. JOHNSOn

Passion often turns the cleverest men into idiots and makes the greatest blockheads clever.

When we are in love, we often doubt what we most believe.

No disguise can long conceal love where it exists, or long feign it where it is lacking.

There are two kinds of faithfulness in love: one is based on forever finding new things to love in the loved one; the other is based on our pride in bdeig faithful.

If you think you love your mistress for her own sake, you are quite mistaken.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. FRENCH PROVERB

The discovery that one cannot well give back or be given back what one has given or been given in the same place is sometimes as painful as the discovery that one is being loved on principle and not froni preference. WILLIAMS

Love is ever rewarded either with the reciprocal, or with an inward and secret contempt.
BACON

No woman ever hates a man for being in love with her; but many a woman hates a man for being a friend to her.
POPE

Mettā

Mettā In English one is used to the one word love (= amour, amore, amor), which has to serve for all. Greek discriminates eros & agape, which duality is very hard to render in Latin or English. English inherits much of its crude matter-of-factness and empiricism from the vulgar Latins who had only the one word, amor, (and Latins of today make do with only l(’amour) and l(’amore).
In Pali one finds there are three: kāmacchanda, sineha and mettā: (physical lust or desire for sensuality; sentimental affection or attachment to individual persons; and loving-kindness or benevolence extendable as a universal attitude to all beings).

Lust is selfish desire seeking satisfaction mainly through the sense of touch and is not interested in the well-being of its object at all. Selfish in the first degree.

Affection can be accompanied by physical lust or not and seeks satisfaction in association with the object (physical nearness, though not necessarily contact). It is interested in the welfare of the object, though unconcerned about anyone else, and does not exclude the harming of others for the benefit of its object. Thus it is selfish in the second degree.

Mettā starts from sineha, but by generalizing becomes unselfish and chooses welfare of all.
Nanamoli Thera

Cioran:

Love at its most impassioned does not bring two human beings so close together as calumny. Inseparable, slanderer and slandered constitute a “transcendent” unity, forever welded one to the other. Nothing can separate them. One inflicts harm, the other endures it, but if he endures it, it is because he is accustomed to doing so, can no longer do without it, even insists upon it. He knows that his wishes will be gratified, that he will never be forgotten, that whatever happens he will be eternally present in the mind of his indefatigable benefactor.

“Neither romance nor temperament,” the Marquise said of herself. We understand why her liaison with the Regent did not last more than two weeks. They were just alike, dangerously external to their own sensations. Does not boredom, their common torment, flourish in the abyss that opens between the mind and the senses? No more spontaneous movements, no more unconsciousness. “Love” is the first to suffer. Chamfort’s9 definition of it is perfectly suited to a period of “fantasy” and “epidermis” in which a Rivarol10 boasted of being able, at the climax of a certain convulsion, to solve a geometry problem. Everything was cerebral, even orgasm. A still graver phenomenon, this deterioration of the senses, instead of affecting only a few isolated creatures, became the deficiency, the scourge of an entire class, wasted by the constant use of irony.

According to Julius Capitolinus, his biographer, Marcus Aurelius raised his wife’s lovers “to the greatest honors.”
Wisdom borders on extravagance; moreover a sage deserves the name only insofar as he is an original, a real character.

For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.

The interesting thing about friendship is that it is — almost as much as love — an inexhaustible source of disappointment and outrage, thereby of fruitful surprises it would be madness to try to do without.

It is with good reason that in the sects which held fecundity in suspicion—the Bogomils, for instance, and the Cathari—marriage was condemned; that abominable institution which all societies have always protected, to the despair of those who do not yield to the common delirium. To procreate is to love the scourge—to seek to maintain and to augment it. They were right, those ancient philosophers who identified fire with the principle of the universe, and with desire, for desire burns, devours, annihilates: At once agent and destroyer of beings, it is sombre, it is infernal by essence.
This world was not created in joy. Yet we procreate in pleasure. True enough—but pleasure is not joy, it is joy’s simulacrum: its function consists in deceiving, in making us forget that creation bears, down to its least detail, the mark of that initial melancholy from which it issued. Necessarily illusory, it is pleasure too which permits us to carry out certain performances which in theory we repudiate. Without its cooperation, continence, gaining ground, would seduce even the rats. But it is in what we call the transports of the flesh that we understand how fraudulent pleasure is. In the flesh, pleasure reaches its peak, its maximum intensity, and it is here, at the zenith of its success, that it suddenly opens to its unreality, that it collapses in its own void. The voluptuous flesh is the disaster of pleasure.
We cannot grant that a god, or even a man, proceeds from a gymnastic climaxed by a moan. It is curious that at the end of such a long period of time, “evolution” has not managed to perfect another formula. Why should it take the trouble, moreover, when the one in force functions so well and suits everybody? Let there be no mistake: life in itself is not in question, life is as mysterious and enervating as could be wished. What is not so is the exercise in question, of an inadmissible facility, given the consequences. When we know what fate permits each man, we remain stunned by the disproportion between a moment’s oblivion and the prodigious quantity of disgraces which result from it. The more one reverts to this subject, the more one finds that the only men who have understood anything about it are those who have opted for orgy or for asceticism, the debauched or the castrated.

Why envy or fear those bones which bear such and such a name, that skull which has no love for me? Why, too, love someone or love myself, why suffer in any case, when I know the image I must invoke in order to alleviate these miseries? The sharpened consciousness of what lies in wait for the flesh ought to destroy both love and hate. Actually it manages only to attenuate and, in rare moments, to subdue them. Otherwise it would be only too easy: represent death and be happy . . . , and the macabre, gratifying our most secret desires, would be all profit.
Since procreation supposes a nameless distraction, it is certain that if we were to become prudent, in other words indifferent to the fate of the race, we should retain only a few samples, the way we preserve certain creatures of vanishing species. Let us block the way of all flesh, let us try to paralyze its alarming spread. We are in the presence of a veritable epidemic of life, a proliferation of faces. Where and how to remain, still, face-to-face with God?