The Four Loves Quotes

“Human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“This is what comes, he says, of giving one’s heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Dado que realmente nos necesitamos unos a otros (<”
― C.S. Lewis, Los Cuatro Amores

“«El amor deja de ser un demonio solamente cuando deja de ser un dios» (Denis de Rougemont). Lo cual puede ser también expuesto en esta forma: «El amor empieza a ser un demonio desde el momento en que comienza a ser un dios». Este contrapunto me parece a mí una indispensable salvaguarda; porque si no tenemos en cuenta esa verdad de que Dios es amor, esa verdad puede llegar a significar para nosotros lo contrario: todo amor es Dios.”
― C.S. Lewis, Los Cuatro Amores

“Es un descubrimiento muy antiguo que los placeres pueden dividirse en dos clases: los que no lo serían si no estuviesen precedidos por el deseo, y aquellos que lo son de por sí, y no necesitan de una preparación. Un ejemplo de lo primero sería un trago de agua: es un placer si uno tiene sed, y es un placer enorme si uno está muy sediento. Pero probablemente nadie en el mundo, salvo que se sienta empujado por la sed o por indicación del médico, se serviría un vaso de agua y se lo bebería por puro gusto. Un ejemplo de la otra clase serían los involuntarios e imprevistos placeres del olfato: el aroma proveniente de un sembrado de habas o de una hilera de guisantes de olor, que a uno le llega de improviso en su paseo matinal. Hasta ese momento uno estaba satisfecho sin desear nada; y entonces el placer—que puede ser muy grande—llega como un don no buscado, como algo que viene de pronto.”
― C.S. Lewis, Los Cuatro Amores

“La mente humana, por lo general, es más propensa a elogiar o despreciar que a describir y definir.”
― C.S. Lewis, Los Cuatro Amores

“We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom, or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The really surprising thing is not that these insatiable demands made by the unlovable are sometimes mad in vain, but that they are so often met. Sometimes one sees a woman's girlhood, youth and long years of her maturity up to the verge of old age all spent in tending, obeying, caressing, and perhaps supporting, a maternal vampire who can never be caressed and obeyed enough.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“It seems to sanction all sorts of actions they would not otherwise have dared. I do not mean solely, or chiefly, acts that violate chastity. They are just as likely to be acts of injustice or uncharity against the outer world. The pair can say to one another in an almost sacrificial spirit, "It is for love's sake that I have neglected my parents - left my children - cheated my partner - failed my friend at his greatest need.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“But thirdly we have the view which St. Francis expressed by calling his body "Brother Ass." All three may be-I am not sure-defensible; but give me St. Francis for my money.
Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass—may pass in the first half-hour—into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later. And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the lovers. But this, so far from obliterating the distinction between the two loves, puts it in a clearer light. If one who was first, in the deep and full sense, your Friend, is then gradually or suddenly revealed as also your lover you will certainly not want to share the Beloved’s erotic love with any third. But you will have no jealousy at all about sharing the Friendship. 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 travellers on the same quest, have all a common vision.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“This balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Nature ‘dies’ on those who try to live for a love of nature. Coleridge ended by being insensible to her; Wordsworth, by lamenting that the glory had passed away. Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds, and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overwhelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Good men needed to be convinced that their country’s cause was just; but it was still their country’s cause, not the cause of justice as such. The difference seems to me important. I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds—wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine—I become insufferable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“If you would be loved, be lovable,’ said Ovid.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Similarly there is a distinction between public and domestic courtesy. The root principle of both is the same: ‘that no one give any kind of preference to himself’. But the more public the occasion, the more our obedience to this principle has been ‘taped’ or formalised. There are ‘rules’ of good manners. The more intimate the occasion, the less the formalisation; but not therefore the less need of courtesy. On the contrary, Affection at its best practises a courtesy which is incomparably more subtle, sensitive, and deep than the public kind. In public a ritual would do. At home you must have the reality which that ritual represented, or else the deafening triumphs of the greatest egoist present.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Those who leave their manners behind them when they come home from the dance or the sherry party have no real courtesy even there. They were merely aping those who had.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“nationally suicidal type of education which keeps back the promising child because the idlers and dunces might be ‘hurt’ if it were undemocratically moved into a higher class than themselves.”
― 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 unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is—in her own mere nature—least lovable. For the Church has no beauty but what the Bridegroom gives her; He does not find, but makes her, lovely.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“É verdade que a língua nao é um guia infalível, mas, apesar de todos os seus defeitos, ela contém um bom estoque de percepção e experiência. Se começarmos a menosprezá-la, ela terá como se vingar. É melhor não seguir Humpty Dumpty, fazendo com que as palavras signifiquem qualquer coisa que quisermos.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Essa avaliação de que o objeto é muito bom, essa atenção (quase homenagem) a ele oferecida como se fosse uma dívida, esse desejo de que seja e continue a ser aquilo que é, embora nunca possamos desfrutar dele, estende-se não somente às coisas, mas também às pessoas. Quando isso é oferecido a uma mulher, chamamos admiração; quando é oferecido a um homem, chamamos admiração do herói; quando o fazemos com relação a Deus, é simplesmente adoração.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Para um cristão não existem coincidências. Um Mestre de cerimônias secreto está a trabalhar. Cristo, que disse a seus discípulos "Vocês não me escolheram, eu os escolhi",, pode verdadeiramente dizer a cada grupo de amigos cristãos "Vocês não escolheram uns aos outros, eu escolhi vocês uns para os outros".”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“But in the long run it is perhaps even more apparent in our growing - for it ought to be growing - awareness that our whole being by its very nature is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are dangling loose.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“But we need not surrender the love of nature--chastened and limited as I have suggested--to the debunkers. Nature cannot satisfy the desires she arouses nor answer theological questions nor sanctify us. Our real journey to God involves constantly turning our backs on her; passing from the dawn-lit fields into some poky little church, or (it might be) going to work in an East End parish. But the love of her has been a valuable and, for some people, an indispensable initiation.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Four Loves

“Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience. If you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on. We had better not follow Humpty Dumpty in making words mean whatever we please.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves