“Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.”

—  James Hillman

Last update May 19, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not becaus…" by James Hillman?
James Hillman photo
James Hillman 5
American psychologist 1926–2011

Related quotes

François Fénelon photo

“Pure love is in the will alone; it is no sentimental love, for the imagination has no part in it; it loves, if we may so express it, without feeling, as faith believes without seeing.”

François Fénelon (1651–1715) Catholic bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 399.

“We don't stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don't stop hating them either.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

Source: One Last Thing Before I Go

Harold Lloyd photo

“Love is the closest thing to laughter and the closest thing to tears. Love is the motive power of everything in the universe that has beauty in it. Love is the reason for everything and the reward for everything.
It’s always seemed strange to me that we have to use the word love for so many things. And yet when you come to think of it, that’s all right, too, because love is in everything in some form or another. Without it, I imagine the flowers would stop blooming and the sun would stop shining and people would stop laughing, and even the rain wouldn’t fall.
So love is always growth.
I think if I could have just one word for love—it would be understanding.
Love must always be unselfish, and strangely enough, love is the only thing in the world that ever is unselfish. And if it isn’t unselfish, it’s only a counterfeit of love.”

Harold Lloyd (1893–1971) American film actor and producer

"What is Love? Twelve Men of the Screen Give Their Ideas". Photoplay, February 1925, p. 36. (Photoplay Publishing Company). https://archive.org/stream/pho28chic#page/n163/mode/2up

John Galsworthy photo

“It isn't enough to love people because they're good to you, or because in some way or other you're going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

A Bit O' Love (1915)

“Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.”

Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer

Source: Turning to one another (2002), p. 19

“At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Graham Greene photo

“If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic
Gabriel García Márquez photo

“we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer
Elbert Hubbard photo

“If we ever damned it will not be because we have loved too much, but because we have loved too little.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911)

Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo

“Free will is critical in a loving relationship because there cannot be love without the opportunity to oppose that love. There cannot be an appreciation without the opportunity to express it through choice. If we are made in the image of the Divine, then just as God has free will, we must also have it. The difficulty arises in our inability to understand, or accept, that it is not beneficial to try to use our free will separate from God. This is because we are part and parcel of God, a tiny fragment of the whole, but we are not the complete whole. As part of the whole, our function is to serve the whole. The whole is certainly not meant to serve the part. For example, imagine if your stomach tried to eat on its own and told your mouth, "I'm tired of you always taking the food first. I think I should get it first."”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

This would be impossible. A part cannot properly function separately from the whole. This is the natural order of the universe.
Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 4: Fire and Brimstone, Horns and Tail, p. 66-67

Related topics