“It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.”

— Sigmund Freud, book Civilization and Its Discontents

Source: Civilization and Its Discontents

Last update Oct. 4, 2025. History

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Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psycho… 1856–1939

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“We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Source: 1920s, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Ch. 2; as translated by James Strachey, p.63

“We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 125
Original: Nunca amamos niguém. Amamos, tão-somente, a ideia que fazemos de alguém. É a um conceito nosso — em suma, é a nós mesmos — que amamos.
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“So sweet love seemed that April morn,
When first we kissed beside the thorn,
So strangely sweet, it was not strange
We thought that love could never change.”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

Bk. V, No. 5, So Sweet Love Seemed http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6639&poem=29064, st. 1 (1893). <br class="br">Shorter Poems (1879-1893)

“Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything. So that self-love is the basis of all love.”

Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) English poet

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“When we give ourselves in love we become our most vulnerable. We are never safe. We become open to disappointment and hurt.”

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“I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.”

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“It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.”

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“Are people so unhappy when they love?"
"Yes, Christine, when they love and are not sure of being loved.”

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“If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks. Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt.”

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