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I just read a book by C.S. Lewis called The Four Loves. It was good. Here are some quotes from the book.
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"Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend."
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"Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you already had: to feel that not only are we two united by erotic love but we three or four or five are all travelers on the same quest, have all a common vision."
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"The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the 'World' are those who really transform it."
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"The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all."
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"In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funnies in all the others."
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"For we all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men 'after our own heart.' Only they really know our mind and judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread."
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"The gnat-like cloud of petty anxieties and decisions about the conduct of the next hour have interfered with my prayers more often than any passion or appetite whatever."
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"For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms."
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"It is as if Christ said to us through Eros, 'Thus—just like this—with this prodigality—not counting the cost—you are to love me and the least of my brethren'"
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"The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."
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"Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness."
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"We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it."
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"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 the man, that constitutes inordinacy…But the question whether we are loving God or the earthly Beloved 'more' is not, so far as concerns our Christian duty, a question about the comparative intensity of two feelings. The real question is, which (when the alternative comes) do you serve, or choose, or put first? To which claim does your will, in the last resort yield?"
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"We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, loving-kindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love."
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Ahh, good ol' Clive Staples.
Peace.
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