We all think we are experts in love, and in part we are. We all know the ecstasy that is experienced in those first months of a relationship and we also know the road to hell when the ties are broken and it is a free fall into the abyss. Despite this, considering love as something banal that does not imply deep reflection is a lack of respect for that feeling that can move the world.
Philosophy has found paradoxes and ironies, it has managed to break down the concept and deconstruct it so that we can see it from every angle we want. However, no matter how much we think about the concept of love, no matter how much philosophers tell us, as soon as we fall in love we lose the ability to reason about it and just feel it.
“Age does not protect you from love. Love, to a certain extent, protects you from age.”
Anais Nin
“Everything that is done for love, is done beyond good and evil.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“The day it is possible for women to love not out of weakness but out of strength, not to escape from themselves but to find themselves, not to humiliate themselves but to reaffirm themselves; on that day her love will be for her, as it is for man, a source of life.”
Simone deBeauvoir
“We look for happiness but without knowing where, like drunkards looking for their home knowing they have one.”
Voltaire
“Beauty seduces the flesh in order to gain permission to pass into the soul.”
Simone Weill
“Your vision will become clearer only when you can see into your heart.”
Carl Jung
“Friendship is a soul that lives in two bodies; a heart that dwells in two souls”.
Aristotle
“Being deeply loved gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
Lao Tse
“Falling in love is simply uncorking the imagination and bottling common sense.”
Helen Rowland
“Forgiveness is the last form of love.”
Reinhold Niebuhr
“Take a look at the sun, look at the moon and stars, admire the beauty of the shoots of the earth. Then he thinks”.
Hildegard of Bingen
“If your heart is a volcano, how do you expect flowers to sprout?”
Khalil Gibran
“Is it any wonder that love has almost always preferred the poetic path to the philosophical one?”
Mary Zambrano
“Love consists in feeling that the Sacred Being beats within the loved one”.
Plato
“There are only two days in the year when nothing can be done. One is called yesterday and the other Tomorrow. Therefore Today is the ideal day to love, grow and mainly live”.
Dalai Lama
“The beauty that attracts rarely coincides with the beauty that falls in love.”
Jose Ortega y Gasset
“Love and do what you want. If you are silent, you will be silent with love; if you scream, you will scream with love; if you correct, you will correct with love; if you forgive, you will forgive with love.”
Gaius Cornelius Tacitus
We will know the state of love only when jealousy, envy, possession and domination end. As long as there is possessiveness, there is no love.”
Jidu Krishnamurti
“He who seeks to ensure the well-being of others, already has his own insured.”
Confucius
Philosophy teaches us that the answers can always change, but that the truth lies in seeking other people, other beings. Love is not only to connect with a person, but to be in harmony with the universe, with all things and with the energy that allows us to love more every day.