“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”

— Susan Sontag

Source: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

Last update June 9, 2022. History

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Susan Sontag168

American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist 1933–2004

John Minford (1946) New Zealand sinologist

Master-Insight.com Interview (2016)

“That which they call love, it is nothing except the pain of longing.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Daz si da heizent minne,
Deis niewan senede leit.
"Friuntlîchen lac", line 19; translation from Gale Sigal Erotic Dawn-Songs of the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996) p. 36.

“It could be that the total scenario for human beings is an insoluble mystery until we die, followed by nothing at all.”

Bryan Magee (1930–2019) British politician

Confessions of a Philosopher (1997)

“Wicked people have nothing human about them except passions: they are almost their virtues.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.”

Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) Norwegian writer

Source: The Wreath

“In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

Letter to James Baldwin (21 November 1962).
General sources
Context: In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.