The Four Loves Quotes

“Amar é, sempre, ser vulnerável. Para que nunca se sofra com isso, aconselha-se não se amar algo, ou mesmo, alguém. Se sugere proteger a si mesmo nos próprios hobbies, mimos e zelos, evitar qualquer envolvimento com as pessoas, guardar o coração na segurança do caixão do próprio ego. Dessa forma, nessa tumba segura e tenaz, sem movimento ou ar, o seu coração provavelmente mudará para melhor. Sim, sim, ele não se partirá, antes se tornará indestrutível, impenetrável, invencível ou inalienável!: ele nunca precisará de algum perdão.
Mas essa comprável alternativa sistemática de proteção de tragédias, é preciso que se diga, é condenatória. Isso, porque o único lugar que existe além do céu, onde se pode estar perfeitamente a salvo de todos os acidentes e perturbações do amor, é o inferno”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“El amor empieza a ser un demonio desde el momento en que comienza a ser un dios.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how "fear" of God could have ever meant to me anything but the lowest prudential efforts to be safe, if I had never seen certain ominous ravines and unapproachable crags. And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by "love" of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Liking and Loves for the Sub-Human

“Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: “We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.” Need-love says of a woman “I cannot live without her”; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection – if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.” p.17

Friendship

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” p.71”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Of all arguments against love, none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as "Careful! This might lead you to suffering."

To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him less. And who could conceivably begin to love God on such a prudential ground-- because the security (so to speak) is better? Who could even include it among the grounds for loving?”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word "glory" a meaning for me.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who “happen to be there.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: “We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done “for love’s sake” is thereby lawful and even meritorious.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Eros, honoured without reservation and obeyed unconditionally, becomes a demon.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher, or the Christian by staring in his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Medicine labours to restore 'natural' structure or 'normal' function. But greed, egoism, self-deception,and self-pity are not abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal any man from whom these failings were wholly absent? 'Natural,' if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have only seen one such Man. And he was not at all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be 'well adjusted' to your world if it says 'you havea devil' and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn; this is only another way of saying that nature does not teach.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“He has impressed upon our natures or states—must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“it is probably impossible to love any human being simply "too much". We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for man, that constitutes the inordinancy. But even this must be refined upon.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“But for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, 'Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.' The friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others...At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. it is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves. I was looking forward to writing some fairly easy”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I am driven to literary examples because you, the reader, and I do not live in the same neighbourhood; if we did, there would unfortunately be no difficulty about replacing them with examples from real life.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value;”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“La amistad surge fuera del mero compañerismo cuando dos o más compañeros descubren que tienen en común algunas ideas o intereses o simplemente algunos gustos que los demás no comparten y que hasta ese momento cada uno pensaba que era su propio y único tesoro, o su cruz. La típica expresión para iniciar una amistad puede ser algo así: «¿Cómo, tú también? Yo pensaba que era el único».”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“If ever the book which I am not going to write is written it must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom’s specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“La amistad nace en el momento en el que una persona le dice a la otra: ¿Qué? ¿Tú también ? Pensé que era el único.”
― C.S. Lewis, Los Cuatro Amores