What do we know about love from books?

German Gesse «Demian»

• He loved and in doing so found himself. And most love in order to lose themselves in the process.
• Love must not ask… and must not demand, love must have the power to be sure of itself. Then something does not attract her, but she herself attracts.

Milan Kundera “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

• She brought him up not in order to remake him (as the husband wants to remake his wife, and the wife – her husband), but only in order to teach him an elementary language that would allow them to understand each other and live together.
• What is coquetry? Perhaps one could say that this is such behavior, the purpose of which is to make it clear to another that sexual intimacy with him is possible, but this possibility should never be presented as indisputable. In other words, coquetry is the promise of intercourse without a guarantee.

Erich Fromm “Who is a man”

What is called love for one single person turns out to be just an addiction; who loves one single person does not love anyone.

Julio Cortazar “The Game of Classics”

• Love is an ontologizing rite, in its very essence containing the ability to bestow.
• If we are talking about love, then we are talking about sex life. On the contrary, it is not necessary. But it seems to me that sex life and sex are not the same thing.

Marina Tsvetaeva “Diaries”

• In order for people to understand each other, it is necessary that they walk or lie side by side.
• The first victory of a woman over a man is the story of a man about his love for another.
• Love: a gap in time.
• Betrayal already points to love. You can’t betray a friend.

Vladimir Nabokov “Mashenka”

All love requires solitude, cover, shelter.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky “Lame Fate”

There is no time to love in our time: the buses are crowded, there are queues in the shops, a nursery on the other side of the city, you need to be a very young and very carefree person in order to be capable of love. And now only elderly couples who have managed to hold out together for a quarter of a century, do not drown in the housing problem, do not go berserk from a myriad of all-corroding minor inconveniences, amicably share power and duties among themselves, love now.

Gilbert Chesterton “The Persistent Creed”

Both common sense and life experience tell us that romantic love is natural for youth, and in more mature years it is corresponded to, it is continued by conjugal and parental love.

Otto Weininger “Gender and Character”

• The problematic man wants to know, the problematic woman wants only to be known.
• … A woman can only be touched, but not shaken.
• A woman is her best medium, a man is her best hypnotist.

François La Rochefoucauld Maxims and Moral Reflections

• No pretense will help to hide love for a long time when it is, or to portray it when it is not.
• There are no such people who, having ceased to love, would not begin to be ashamed of past love.
• If you judge love by its usual manifestations, it looks more like enmity than friendship.
• There are many such women in the world who have not had a single love affair in their lives, but very few who have had only one.
• Love is one, but there are thousands of fakes for it.
• Not infrequently, women who do not love at all still imagine that they love: the fascination with intrigue, the natural desire to be loved, the uplift of mental strength caused by adventure, and the fear of offending rejection – all this leads them to think that they are passionately in love, although in reality they are just flirting.
• As long as people love, they forgive.
• When a woman falls in love for the first time, she loves her lover; in the future, she loves only love.

Arthur Schopenhauer “Thoughts”

• If it were not for women, then in the first hours of our life we ​​would be deprived of help, in the middle – pleasures, and at the end – consolations.
• Having split the human race into two halves, nature has drawn a dividing line not in the very middle. With all the polarity, the difference between the positive and negative poles is not only qualitative, but at the same time quantitative.

Oscar Wilde “Prison Confession”

After all, in the final analysis, any community, whether it be marriage or friendship, is based on the opportunity to talk with each other, and this opportunity is based on common interests, while people of completely different cultural levels have common interests usually of the basest kind.

Oscar Wilde’s “Portrait of Dorian Gray”

• The main harm of marriage is that it eradicates selfishness from a person. And unselfish people are colorless, they lose their individuality.
• The purpose of love is to love. only.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky “The Brothers Karamazov”

• … Falling in love does not mean loving. You can fall in love and hate.
• To love a person, it is necessary that he hides, and as soon as he shows his face, love is gone. … The face of a person often prevents many people who are still inexperienced in love from loving.
• I love you and, loving, I torment.
• God save you, dear boy, someday ask for forgiveness from your beloved woman! Especially with your beloved, especially, no matter how guilty you are before her! Because a woman is, brother, the devil knows what it is, at least I know a lot about them! Well, try to confess your guilt before her, “I’m guilty, they say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”: then a hail of reproaches will come! For no reason will he forgive you directly and simply, but will humiliate you to a rag, deduct what was not even there, take everything, forget nothing, add his own, and then only forgive. And this is even better, the best of them! He’ll scrape the last scrapes and lay everything on your head — such, I’ll tell you, the livingness in them sits, in every single one, in these angels, without whom it’s impossible for us to live! You see, my dear, I will frankly and simply say: every decent person should be under the shoe of at least some woman. This is my conviction; not a belief, but a feeling.

Fyodor Dostoevsky “Teenager”

• Believe me, the life of every woman, no matter what she preaches, is an eternal search for someone to obey … so to speak, a thirst to obey. And mind you – without a single exception.
• A Russian woman is never a woman.
• If the matter of marriage depended on women alone, not a single marriage would have survived.