Edited: 2025-Sep-23
- Many who say “I love you,” mean that they want the other to love them.
- The confusion between love and desire, between Agape and Eros, gives rise to most of the tragedy and pain in human relations.
- Desire’s gift is a baited hook.
- The emotion produced by desire is stronger but more transient than that produced by beneficence.
- The strength of desire’s emotion deceives both the one desired and the one desiring.
- The opposite of desire is hate. The opposite of beneficence is indifference.
- Eros’s intensity is more peremptory than Agape’s joy.
- Desire, in emotional terms, more closely resembles hate than beneficence resembles indifference. Thus the ease with which desire and hate can merge into one another.
- Hate differs from indifference in that hate at least implies engagement, whereas indifference is total negation.
- Many would rather feel strongly than feel happy.
- Love can give by receiving, since accepting a gift attributes worth to the giver.
- Love is willing to receive in order to give, while desire will only give in order to receive, or rather ensnare.
- “If it doesn’t break your heart it isn’t love.” Love accepts suffering in hope: not hope of its own good but the good of the beloved.
- Love that can’t bear pain isn’t worth the name, but bearing pain doesn’t mean you are loving. Another of those annoying relational paradoxes.
- Love is astounding presumption: it assumes it has something to give that the beloved will be better off having.
- Agape can embrace and exalt Eros, but Eros must die to make room for Agape.
- Love is creative: it does not simply love the lovely; it engenders loveliness.
- To give being to another is the most astonishingly wonderful and beautiful thing one can do for a person. That to many this does not seem evident is also astonishing.
- Only the rich can give; the one who loves thereby shows himself rich.
- One can always rightly love another person, since at worst true beneficence does no harm.
- A paradox of love: To offer love in order to receive love is not really offering love. To offer love without offering to receive love is not really offering love.
- Desire is competitive and exclusive, but there is an apotheosis of Eros as it is taken into Agape where it loves all for the sake of the beloved.