Quotes
Since love is born in extreme vulnerability and seeks to overcome that condition through a correspondingly extreme invulnerability, it easily succumbs to its greatest temptation: to play God. To imagine it is unconditioned by the value of the loved one. To pretend that it is sovereign enough to be devoted disinterestedly to him ‘for his own sake’. To pronounce itself eternal.
Love. A History — Yale University PressKitabı okudu
And the sacred is always accompanied by fears of desecration. When the stakes are so high lapses of devotion are ominous. And easy: dedication is readily threatened by simple pleasures, doubt, laziness and less demanding idols. Sacrilege is just a step from reverence.
Love. A History — Yale University PressKitabı okudu
[St Francis of Assisi] rejects possessions not to flee the world, but on the contrary to come close to a world uncluttered by their demands and distractions. He helps us see that to call money ‘worldly’ is a misnomer; for it *obstructs intimacy* with the world rather than expresses it. He provokes the thought that the seeker after wealth is not too bound up with ordinary things but not bound up enough.
Love. A History — Yale University PressKitabı okudu
To be in a relationship of love is, in other words, always to be in a relationship of fear; indeed, the greater the love the greater the fear.
Love. A History — Yale University PressKitabı okudu
[…] for we all need to ascribe ultimate value and power to something — if not to God then to freedom, art, nation, landscape, truth, ancestors, leaders, ethnic group, family, language, love, evil, the Devil, even money: to whatever we believe (delusionally or not; durably or not) can give our existence unassailable meaning.
Love. A History — Yale University PressKitabı okudu