Is There any Pleasure to Com- pare with Eros?

[By eros is meant the state of “being in love,” a state where sexual or roman- tic infatuation is a necessary but not sufficient condition.]

The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of the import- ance 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 Mount Blanc from a corpse-like 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 ro- manticism 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 intellec- tual to have to explain to himself every sexual call of nature as a fated invita- tion 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 ar- rived there on March 19th, on my way to Paris, I found that Philip [Otto- line’s husband] had unexpectedly had to go to Burnley [Philip’s constituen- cy], so that I was left tête-a-tête with Ottoline. During dinner we made con- versation about Burnley, and politics, and the sins of the Government. After dinner the conversation gradually became more intimate. Making timid ap- proaches, 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 possi- ble. 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 sexu- al 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 es- sentially undifferentiated and can be put to different uses by the will provid- ed 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 near- ly twenty years younger than he and, because of that, he at first avoided sex- ual 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 criti- cal.’ 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 win- dow. 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 in- tolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has over- leaped 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 our- selves. 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 vari- ous 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

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 Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. Midsummer Night’s Dream (Helena)

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject inter- course 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 tax- payer 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 every- body 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

There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman. Samuel Johnson

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... Indif- ference 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

The pleasure of love is loving, and we get more happiness from the passion we feel than from the passion we inspire. La Rochefoucauld

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 pleas- ing in men. Bertrand Russell

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 predict- ably 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