Notes on Love

PAUL GÉRALDY

A French Epigrammatist Throws New Light on the Most Obscure Passion in the World

§1.

We may as well love ourselves, for we shall never find sufficient love elsewhere.

§2.

Love was woman's invention, but man has exploited it.

A first-rate intellect is a third-rate lover.

§4.

Men hunt love only to kill it.

§5.

Man falls in love with a woman's mind and heart. When he turns to claim them, he receives nothing but love.

§6.

Everyone is created with a thousand potentialities for giving pleasure or displeasure— which is to say that everyone has already within him the unwritten history of love.

§7.

Men devote themselves to work to impress women, but they end by preferring the work to the women.

§8.

It is sad to have to admit sometimes that the object of life is not love.

§9.

The formula of happiness is believed to read: "Love, money and health," whereas it should read: "Health, money and love."

§10.

In love, man's love of self increases, woman's vanishes.

§11.

We envy the successful lover and despise in him the qualities which make him successful.

§12.

We conquer by lies and then believe that we are loved for our real selves.

§13.

We swear to women that they are angels and then prove to them that they are fools.

§14.

A women is at home in love. A man is scarcely more than a guest.

§15.

It is not enough to be a lover. It is too much to be in love.

§16.

We have tried to subject women to the same processes of adaptation and regulation as nature. But they have resisted more successfully.

§17.

We have assimilated Greece, Rome, the Barbarians, and China. We are now assimilating the Negroes. But we have not yet assimilated woman.

§18.

Boys blush to think of their senses. Men blush to think of their hearts.

§19.

A man delights in granting a woman her desires and indulging her caprices providing that her satisfaction is moderate and that she does not prefer the gifts to the giver.

§20.

At twenty, one demands of love intense spirituality, a kind of sublime collaboration, a lofty union of souls, the summits, the ideal, the inaccessible, the Divine! ... At forty one asks for warmth, freshness, youth, the human body.

§21.

To realize a satisfactory ideal from the conflicting elements of masculine sensuality and feminine beauty, man is logical in asking of woman that she be at the same time desirable and inaccessible.

§22.

When a man admires a woman's portrait, he is admiring his own reflection.

§23.

It is the role of woman to select the man who will select her.

§24.

The first embrace is the first and last perfect moment of love.

§25.

Woman must take the defensive in love, not because she is sensually dormant but because she is more susceptible than a male morality will permit.

§26.

For man, love is an ennobling distraction; for woman it is a self-negating career.

§27.

Must there not be an infinite amount of poetry in man, a marvellous faith in his ambitions, for him to let this word "love" be used to designate the sorry gestures of love?

§28.

He who is in love is without peace unless he can be satisfied with both himself and his beloved.

§29.

The man asks of the woman he loves that she continually justify and corroborate his choice of her. Since he is responsible for this choice, her shortcomings humiliate him. When he disapproves of her, it is himself that he has ceased to love.

§30.

We seldom sufficiently realize, in judging women, what a responsibility it is to be one.

§31.

Woman is not virtuous; but she gave man all his ideas of virtue.

§32.

Each of us harbors within himself the claims of a conqueror and the needs of the conquered. We must receive both admiration and sympathy; we expect to be loved for our good qualities and our defects, our strengths and our weaknesses.

§33.

The weak and destitute are the most eager for love. They realize that they have little to expect of the world, which puts so high a price upon its favours, but that love can make up the difference, by giving them much more than is their due.

§34.

The lover seeks that deep gratification which he could only have obtained otherwise by long years of labour, of concentration and struggle, of good luck, and of repeated victories over himself and others. He expects the woman to be in advance the concrete reward not only for what he is, but also for what he would like to be.

§35.

Never have we so much need of being loved as when we feel ourselves least lovable.

§36.

One cares little to be loved for what he already has. The possession is enough. But the talents and the accomplishments which are lacking dig little holes in the mind which it is the function of a lover to fill. Upon each of our faults and our insufficiencies, we need a bandage of love.

§37.

When a man is young and good-looking, he wants to be loved for his genius. Once he becomes famous, dyes his hair, and has his face massaged, he fears it may be his reputation and his success which procure him the homage of women.

§38.

If we possessed no shortcomings, we should never think of love.

§39.

There is far more love in friendship than in love.

§40.

We are out of sympathy with the world's ideas of morality. We think we have evaded them, and proclaim our right to begin at the beginning and to love in our own way. Nevertheless, we have had forbears.

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§41.

To love is to desire with passion someone whom, did we not so desire, we should adore.

§42.

There are no times when our love is less. There are times when we love and times when we do not love.

§43.

A man very much in love is somehow admirable; a man very much in love with his wife is somehow absurd.

§44.

In giving up the harem and the gynaeceum, every man has exchanged the safety of his own women for the accessibility of every other man's women.

§45.

Both men and women find an element of nobility in the man whose passion to seduce and to conquer is carried to the point of an idee fixe, just as they find an element of the ignoble in the man whose passion is to defend his possessions.

§46.

We all feel that, given one more degree of intelligence, we could bring ourselves to accept a woman's unfaithfulness with equanimity. Our modern resources, our wide field of action gradually cure us of a mania of possession. Ownership is unquestionably a tiresome business serving purely as a sop to our vanity. We love something with greater freedom when it is not attached to us. The desire to monopolize a person, to dominate the imagination, to deny the right to retract, is pretentious and absurd. . . . Were women actually so good, so compliant, we should love them but moderately— which is to say we should not love them at all.

§47.

Women's actions lead a man to his wife. A husband's actions lead his wife to other men.

§48.

At forty a man is surprised at the ease of his conquests. But they no longer greatly flatter his vanity. His reputation and financial standing, his experience, and a certain strength acquired in the process of living, have spoiled the fairness of the game.

§49.

We cease to desire what we are on the verge of attaining. But when we are this close to attaining it, we can no longer do without it.

§50.

Modesty is a sentiment which men believe women possess.

§51.

It is not until late in life that one becomes really resigned to love.

§52.

The eternal tragedy of man, and the subject of all literature, is the discrepancy between what he actually is and what he thinks he is: the dividing of his life between the two poles of love—love and sensuality.

§53.

Women are born actresses. Those who do not go on the stage have not wholly fulfilled their destiny. But those who have fulfilled it are no longer women.

§54.

What the union of man and wife will perhaps give to their child, each of them expects for himself.

§55.

People must resemble each other a little to understand each other. But they must be a bit different to love each other. Yes, like and unlike. . . . What an interesting word "strange" could be!

§56.

The greatest benefit which love has ever brought us is to have made us believe in it.

§57.

This old dream of making the season of flowers eternal! The springtime of love, for ever! Never summer. Fear of the fulfilled. Scorn of the accomplished. Passionate predilection for that which still remains in the stage of the possible. We must arrest nature when the race is at its swiftest; we must capture it at the height of its transport and ebullience, deflecting to our own profit—for what other purpose?—this vital force, spoiling it in the limpid waters of the future.

§58.

Marriage envelops love in so thick a shell that its movements are concealed. The husband no longer keeps watch, believing that his security is secretly gaining strength with time. A shock cracks the shell, and he learns that it was empty.