Edward Robinson's blog: "What the fuck is love......?"

The only but often forgotten purpose of living. gabe -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Love is being kept up all night because you cannot think of anything but your hearts desire...Love is one touch leaving you breathless...All you need is LOVE! lucy xxx When there are no bugs the first time you compile the whole project -- that is love. JAMIE LOVES ERIC -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Two lovers sat on a park bench, with their bodies touching each other, holding hands in the moonlight. There was silence between them. So profound was their love for each other, they needed no words to express it. And so they sat in silence, on a park bench, with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight. Finally she spoke. "Do you love me, John?" she asked. "You know I love you, darling," he replied. "I love you more than tongue can tell. You are the light of my life, my sun, moon and stars. You are my everything. Without you I have no reason for being." Again there was silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench, their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight. Once more she spoke. "How much do you love me, John?" she asked. He answered: "How much do I love you? Count the stars in the sky. Measure the waters of the oceans with a teaspoon. Number the grains of sand on the sea shore." "Impossible, you say? Yes, and it is just as impossible for me to say how much I love you. My love for you is higher than the heavens, deeper than Hades, and broader than the earth. It has no limits, no bounds. Everything must have an ending except my love for you." There was more of silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight. Once more her voice was heard. "Kiss me, John," she implored. And leaning over, he pressed his lips warmly to hers in fervent osculation. -- Samuel M. Johnson, 1976. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interdependence of process. Taking pleasure from the happiness of another. The inability to be content without the contentment of another. There are more kinds of love than there are people. Unfortunately, though, there are fewer kinds of love than the number of people, squared. Love is never having to say you're sorry. Love is having to say you're sorry every five minutes. -- JohnLennon This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. -- http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?passage=1JOHN+3:16 True love is eternal and unconditional, not something you can turn on and off as you so desire. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." -- RobertHeinlein -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TheBeatles Love is all you need. Amen And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I count it some evidence of love that passion can neither convince me it is love, nor stop me wishing it were -- WystanHughAuden? (ill-remembered quote) as yes is to if, love is to yes -- EdwardEstlinCummings Love is when you catch your breath at the sight of your girlfriend's little pink case that her pills come in. -- PhlIp Love is a spiffy way to cause the parents to remain together long enough to raise a child. Or so one hopes. "I love you, but I hate you." -- MisterSpock. "But we are exactly the same." --RobotChicks "That is why I love you, but I hate you." -- MisterSpock Love is the April sun on the blossoming rose. -- Anonymous Love is a hot ass in a tight pair of jeans. -- Anonymous "LOVE is the sensational feeing for one" --Anonymous "LOVE is the girl that sits across from you at spanish"--Anonymous "LOVE is when your with your love one an then meet your soulmate then give her the finger"--Anonymous A form of pair-bonding in humans similar to imprinting in lesser animals. Effects can persist for a long time despite the conspicuous absence of reward. That Love is all there is,/ Is all we know of Love; -- EmilyDickinson Love is the happy side of needing. -- WaldenMathews Love is meeting people's needs. Love is the emotional pleasure we gain from the virtue we perceive in others. Hold Love as important and most everything else will sort itself out. An anagram of vole. Love is one of the four projections of the force of life. -- HelmutLeitner Love is the universal force that makes compatible, what is incompatible. -- FridemarPache Love is a lousy tennis score. Love is the difference between you and me and us. The GreekLanguage? has four different words for love to cover different aspects, including (but obviously not limited to) love suited to physical attraction, and love suited to family ties. Hazy memory: eros is physical attraction; philia is friendship; storge is affection; agape is what St Paul was writing about in 1 Corinthians 13 (see above). (See also: The Four Loves, by CsLewis.) The fact that we can gloss the four Greek words goes to show that English has several different words for love as well. It might be more accurate to say that Bible translators have used the same English words for these four Greek words. Though this was not always the case (cf faith hope and charity becoming faith hope and love in the newer translations.) Note that that does not mean that the words "love" and "charity" are synonyms in the English language. I would also challenge that they are even near-synonyms in general in Christianity, even if they might be due to context in that part of the bible. (This comment arises due to a now-deleted page that was apparently a take-off on the above translation paragraph.) Storge was rarely used, but it could refer to familial affection or (less frequently) sexual love. It appears in the Bible (actually the NT) only in the compound word filostorgos in Romans 12:10. Eros we could gloss as "desire" (or any of its English synonyms). It does not appear in the NT. Scholars currently think that agape and filia mean the same thing when they refer to love. This conclusion is based on diachronic studies performed by Robert Joly in 1968. In the Hellenistic period, the verb kunein ("to kiss") was falling out of use because it sounded like kuein ("to impregnate"), especially in the aorist where the forms are exactly alike. This no doubt resulted in various unsavory puns. So people started to use the word filein ("to love") to refer to kissing. Then the word agapan ("to be content with") they began to use to refer to love. In the koine of the NT, both agapan and filein were in common use as words for love. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Love is a stranger in an open car to tempt you in and drive you far away... From "Love Is A Stranger", a most excellent song about love by the Eurythmics. Love love love is a dangerous drug: You have to receive it and you still can't get enough of the stuff. Recommended. (What? Love or the song?) Both. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLATINI: Love? Surely not. Commander Crane is far too intellectually advanced to submit to a mere short-term hormonal imbalance. Red Dwarf Season 5, Episode 1, 'Holoship'. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love 'never' fails 1 Cor. 13:4-8 Love bears the pain of the world, believes lies, hopes despite sense and reason, endures torture. Good advice by a wife beater to his victim. Quite revealing that the passage never gives a happy side to love, only counsels to endure and keep enduring an infinite sea of pain. (The passages above are all useless, this one is misogynistic.) Love spreads her arms, Waits there for the nails I forgive you boy I will prevail -- StoneRoses? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Out of the mouths of babes: http://www.rinkworks.com/said/kidlove.shtml -- AndrewKoenig -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- True love isn�t about passion or lust or attraction or common interests and personalities. It�s something altogether different. It�s about learning to complement each other, learning to grow with each other. It�s about doing love-things, even when you don�t feel like it, even when life drives you to insanity, even if you think you�ve lost love. It�s about commitment and perseverance and thinking and feeling and happiness. --TimKing (from "Love Through the Eyes of an Idiot") -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Every type of love must fulfill this test: Person A and Person B have a relationship described by some form of the word "love" if both have declared that they will not betray the other in a PrisonersDilemma - type situation, and fully intend to follow up on tha promise. (Of course, they won't have explicitly said that in those terms. But they will have communicated it somehow) There are many different meanings we attach to the word love, but the most important aspect of all of them, and probably the only one that applies across all meanings, is the promise not to betray. (Note that this does not work in reverse - not every strategy to escape the prisoners dilemma would be considered love) This is hysterical. In fact, many relationships described by "love" (especially infatuation) involve betrayal. What you've defined is no more than "trust" and trust is not very useful for defining love. I would argue that infatuation is not the same as love. If you're using the word love differently from how I, and I believe most people, do, I apologize for confusing you, but it might be better if you were to use words in the same sense that other people do or there may be further confusion. My above definition, furthermore, does not describe trust - trust is the belief that someone else won't betray you, as opposed to love, the commitment not to betray someone else. Love would spur a person to choose to co-operate even if they weren't certain (on purely rational grounds) that the other party would do likewise. So let me refine my definition: love is the tendency not to betray, without necessarily having any particular reason to do this. This, of course, has an upside and a downside - it leaves one open to betrayal, but it tends towards a forgive-and-forget strategy which ensures that one can escape the continuous loop of betrayals that a TitForTat strategy might bring. I should "use words in the same sense that other people do"? That's hysterical. Other people use the word "love" for a very much larger range of emotions, sensations, and mental conditions than I do. The word is often misused to refer to infatuation, ecstatic union, submission and domination in addition to the modern romantic love ("in love"), devotion (parental or filial) and affection. The meaning of "love" as expressed by parents in antiquity was denuded of affection or any warm feelings, and is best translated as domination. Meanwhile, the "love" automatically granted to feudal masters is best translated as submission. You would be wrong to dismiss this as ancient barbarism since to this day there exist people in supposedly advanced nations that can't distinguish submission from love. (IainBanks' Inversions, the narrator's description of his feelings for the king.) Your description of trust is wrong-headed. What you describe as love is the essence of trust. Trust is not a belief, it is a self-fulfilling predisposition towards others. Trust is that general mental condition which allows a person to believe that others won't betray them. This condition is not and can never be anything as intellectual or sterile as reason or rationality. The term 'love', even in its restricted sense of a general mental condition which inspires the specific emotion of affection, is not captured by your description of non-betrayal. No form, concept, combination or abstraction of love is captured by your definition of it. Your definition is simply wrong. Fortuitously, it can easily be recycled as a definition of trust. Why self-fulfilling? In certain circumstances (relating to reason), trust may be explicitly based on reason. Let's look at distrust to clarify some matters. What causes distrust? Paranoia, anxiety and fear. These emotions are seldom rational, and very rarely useful. The rush of adrenaline caused by fear is not merely no longer relevant in today's modern world, it is actively dangerous. Even in such supposedly intellectual cases where a person is a religious fanatic or right-winger, it takes very little digging to get at the fact that the anxiety and fear is fundamental, and the belief is a rationalization. (There's a June issue of New Scientist about trust which mentions the fact that trust and religiosity are negatively correlated.) Even in that supposedly intellectual enterprise of foreign policy, the whole dynamic is driven by base emotion. When a population feels intense anxiety, they will invent enemies, provoke them into action, and attack based on arguments so thin you couldn't wipe yourself with them. When such people can't find or invent any enemies, they will progressively feel themselves going insane. And when, eventually, stuff happens and a dispute occurs with someone, they will be happy that an enemy has finally been identified and "it's not all in their head", which only proves that it is. These lunatics then happily proceed to murder the first person to look at them cross-eyed. The origins of war are explained this way. So taking the converse of distrust, it follows that trust is almost always rational but that this is never the determinant factor in whether or not an individual or society is trusting. The lack of emotional handicaps preventing people from basing their actions on reason is a wonderful development of the modern age. Reason alone explains precisely nothing of human behaviour. Why is trust self-fulfilling? First, because of selection bias. If you trust in people, you will find plenty of reason to vindicate your beliefs. If you don't, ditto. Second, because other people automatically react to your attitude. If you place trust in people, they will live up to your expectations, leading to a virtuous cycle. If you do not, they will live down to your expectations, leading to a vicious cycle. Third, because your actions will subconsciously create the situation you believe in. If you don't trust someone, you will automatically antagonize them because you "know" they're untrustworthy. Love is illusion ...but it controls the world.........samarthan bidari -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Love is when you need someone to be a part of your life, even when they are boring and dumb and rude, because you know they will again have one of those moments where they shine and that light is what you need to survive. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Love is the only power greater than truth Is that really true? Or do you just love the sound of it? :-) It's true. There comes a point in life where one realizes the limits of logic. It is then that one must loosen the grip on logic to see even greater truths. Besides, it's not a matter of "love conquers all" - it's that humans will do almost anything in the name of love - but far less in the name of truth. People will usually do more for money than truth, and sometimes than love as well. But I hesitate to consider money the greatest power in the world. And aren't greater truths still truths? Good points. Maybe we could rescue his aphorism by saying "positive power"? I don't know. When love and justice come into conflict, how positive is each? How do lust and friendship stack up on these scales? What would be the outcome if beauty and truth went head to head in a battle royale? I'm afraid I don't consider these considerations especially meaningful. The "empirical evidence" quoted below seems to be talking about manipulative powers, though, which are rarely if ever positive. Oh, well, that's ok. Aphorisms don't really encode absolute truths anyway (no irony intended despite the particular aphorism at hand). They're mnemonic reminders of common sense. "Don't get so hung up on truth that you forget about love", perhaps, is the encoded reminder. The empirical evidence on wielding love versus wielding truth in an argument with your significant other is very clear on this. . . Quite. On the other hand, if you try to live your life wielding only love, with no truth, you will soon find the limits of that as well. But I guess the aphorism implies truth is number two on the list. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Really more QuotesAboutLove?. And some aren't even that. As far as I understand this there's only two people writing, right? It's a bit confusing. I agree to the most part with the guy, I also think that love is a fictional thing, however, is there something like essential love? I'm thinking about the feral children here, didn't they develop some kind of love for the wolves (or other animals they were brought up by?). Also I know that children (infants that is) who receive no love and and are not spoken to will die. Also you talked about trust vs. mistrust, wasn't it Erikson who came up with development stages in children, where trust or mistrust is determined? And should you put yourself in the first rank? The reason why I think people would do (almost) anything for money, is because money serves themselves only. We are egoists by nature, the only real instinct that is inherent to us is that of survival, we want to survive, how we do it, is another issue. -- [frakd] There is no such thing as love. When two people are truly in love�its not a question of what anyone else thinks. It is how they complete the other. How they fill all voids in the other�s life. It is not about material goods or how compatible you are with someone. Being in love with someone is being happy going to bed with the other. The love's object is the last thought on your mind and the first thought when you wake up. Love does exist. When you find it, you know. You wonder how you ever did without it. It is finding that person that embodies all the things that you could ever want in a person. It is finding the exact match to the infinite number of personalities that are possible. It is finding that person that was molded for you. It is the person that has all of these different things in one entity. A Rainbow� TMR Love has much to do with hope and being willing to forsake some of yourself to be their sole partner. TMR correctly envisions our ideal person. We may look for someone who is a perfect match but one hopes to remember that we should seek for and BE some such perfect puzzle piece yet stay pliabe enough to be selfless in our actions. Love is a form of worship is it not? Love seeks to be selfless. PIP TMR, the way you make it sound there should be only one perfect match (as a matter of fact the word perfect would imply this) for every person. Then how would you explain that people can fall in love many times. I think the core of a relationship is memory. I believe memory is in essence what makes us differ from other animals, and memory it is that makes love possible. It is things you share, things that nobody else knows about you, things that make you and the person different from everybody else. It is hard going out with a couple, because always they will have things that only they understand, and you feel like you're just not part of that conversation. And you're not.. My last post here was quite a while ago, and as I think it is quite common at my age, I've changed my mind about many things. And I've changed my mind about love. I think it is feeling, there's really not much more to it, people try to make such a big deal out of it, but really...it is just a feeling. - [frakd] love is when the one person in the world that shouldnt make you cry just happens to be the one person in the world that makes you cry the most- malinda Love is giving someone the ability to destroy you but *trusting* them not to do it love is beeing able to look into her eyes and smileing [JON] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Love is sold annually on February 14th.. http://www.valentineresistance.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Love is a verb - dc talk -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Love doesn't really exist. But then, most of the other things people believe in don't exist, either, but that doesn't stop them from being important. Could it be that they're important because they don't exist? - JayOsako Ah - but love is a greater power than truth. It is one of the few things that can be made to exist just by believing in it. -- LayneThomas -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Love is a snowmobile, racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, trapping you underneath. At night the ice weasels come. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Love is the opposite of fear. -- TimJarman --------------------------------------------------------------------------------