Conditions Of Love The Philosophy Of Intimacy Quotes

Imagination paints a charming view of the future, conveniently adapted to the demands of our current emotion.

We need to be free if we are to love.

A relationship does not start the day two people meet; it starts in the childhood of each partner. For it is long before they meet that the template of their relationship is established.

This is the internal tragedy of love. If love is successful, if our love is returned and develops into a relationship, the person we are with must turn out to be other than we imagined them to be. Love craves closeness, and closeness always brings us face to face with something other than we expected.

Compatibility, on this view, is an achievement of love, not a precondition for love.

What is given by nature is not necessarily good, what is achieved by artifice is not necessarily worthless.

Love can sometimes rise up like a desperate cry from a neglected part of oneself which takes a long view but which is submerged by the presence of strident wants.

Imagination need not stand as an obstacle to clear-sighted perception; on the contrary, it can be a prerequisite for recognition of the less obvious aspects of what is really there.

When we try to love we are not actually trying to undertake a single endeavor; rather, we are trying to do a whole range of different, and sometimes not very compatible, things simultaneously.

It is not suffering as such that makes someone appreciate love, it is only when suffering pierces our vanity—which happens when we do not blame someone else for our pain—that it awakens a deeper respect for love.

fishing, my philosophy is that men will treat women like one of these two things: a sports fish or a keeper. How we meet, how the conversation goes, how the relationship develops, and the demands you make on a man will all determine whether you’ll be treated like a sports fish—a throwback—or a keeper, the kind of woman a man can envision settling down with. And the way we separate the two is very simple, as I explain next. A SPORTS FISH . . . Doesn’t have any rules, requirements, respect for herself, or guidelines, and we men can pick up her scent a mile away. She’s the party girl who takes a sip of her Long Island iced tea or a shot of her Patrón, then announces to her suitor that she just wants to “date and see how it goes,” and she’s the conservatively dressed woman at the office who is a master at networking, but clueless about how to approach men. She has no plans for any ongoing relationships, is not expecting anything in particular from a man, and sets absolutely not nary one condition or restriction on anyone standing before her—she makes it very clear that she’s just along for whatever is getting ready to happen. For sure, as soon as she lets a man know through words and action that he can treat her just any old kind of way, he will do just

But mostly what we think of as the 'meaning' of life concerns the style of the private autobiography we each write and which records how we 'see' ourselves. Whether this autobiography reads as a narrative of progress in which difficulties are transcended, or is chaotic, is the test of whether one's life seems to be meaningful or not. Meaning is something we find, or fail to find, as we follow through this project. We can see how love figures here: love is a major theme, but how we see our experience of love depends upon our general thinking. If, for example, we work with extremely high expectations of love we impose a tragic style upon our self-perceptions: for our experience of love will always be seen under an aspect of failure—failure focused upon ourselves or others. Hence the more subtle our thinking about love, the more intelligently we discriminate ideals from reality, the more interesting our autobiography becomes.

Sincerity is only as good as what we are sincere about.

I still love novels and would rather read them than philosophy, theology, “real” history, psychology, or any other form of fact-based writing. I think I’ve learned more about the human condition—and the scope of the human spirit—from novels than from any other form of writing. (Just as I have learned more about real faith and true spiritual growth from my street-involved friends, as they have shared their stories with me, than I have from any of the sources that are supposed to convey such understanding.)