Relationships and Family

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There's no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.

Love is often the fruit of marriage.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

Love the quest; marriage the conquest; divorce the inquest.

After a few years of marriage a man can look right at a woman without seeing her and a woman can see right through a man without looking at him.

One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.

If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes, a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.

There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.

A promise to love someone forever, then, means, 'As long as I love you I will render unto you the actions of love; if I no longer love you, you will continue to receive the same actions from me, if for other motives.' Thus the illusion remains in the minds of one's fellow men that the love is unchanged and still the same.

A promise to love someone forever, then, means, 'As long as I love you I will render unto you the actions of love; if I no longer love you, you will continue to receive the same actions from me, if for other motives.' Thus the illusion remains in the minds of one's fellow men that the love is unchanged and still the same.

What knows he of love who has not been obliged to despise just what he loved

The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists--and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments; one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength.

Love's cruel notion. - Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of that love, so that he may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change more than it does destruction.

The drive to knowledge has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imagine such a state of things is painful to us! Restless discovering and divining has such an attraction for us, and has grown as indispensable to us as is to the lover his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference – perhaps,indeed, we too are unrequited lovers.

Sensuality often hastens the "Growth of Love" so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.

A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at bottom comes up." Epigrams and Interludes, Section 79

love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.