“We cannot force love. It is an instinctive trait that has its own way of thinking and will.”

Last update Nov. 30, 2023. History

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“Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.”

Honoré de Balzac book A Woman of Thirty

L'amour a son instinct, il sait trouver le chemin du cœur comme le plus faible insecte marche à sa fleur avec une irrésistible volonté qui ne s'épouvante de rien.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. III: At Thirty Years.

“For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

“Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

“Love has a particular trait: it has a task or purpose to fulfill - to abide. By its nature, love is enduring. The Holy Spirit offers our world love that dispels uncertainty; love that overcomes the fear of betrayal; love that carries eternity within; the true love that draws us into a unity that abides!”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Youth Day Vigil (19 July 2008)

“Innocence has its instincts, its needs, its physiological dues.”

Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) French writer

Preface to A Virgin Heart
A Virgin Heart (trans. 1922)

“The Great Commandment demands of everyone the total love of God and the love one's neighbour according to the measure of man's natural self-affirmation. If love is emotion, how can it be demanded? Emotions cannot be demanded. We cannot demand them of ourselves. If we try, something artificial is produced which shows the traits of what had to be suppressed in its production. Repentance, intentionally produced, hides self-complacency in perversion. Love, intentionally produced, shows indifference or hostility in perversion. The means: love as an emotion cannot be commanded. Either love is something other than emotion or the Great Commandment is meaningless.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: Love, Power and Justice (1954), p. 4

“True love has no rules: it lives by instinct.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Il vero amore non ha regole: vive d'istinto.
Source: prevale.net

“Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

Chaque âge a ses plaisirs, son esprit et ses mœurs.
Canto III, l. 374
The Art of Poetry (1674)

“Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Letter to the editor of The New York Times Saturday Book Review (August 1901), as quoted in Joseph Conrad: A Life (2007) by Zdzisław Najder, translated by Halina Najder, p. 315

“One of the most persistent traits of of the Western white man has always been his fanatical and almost instinctive assumption that his systems and ideas about the world are the most desirable, and further that people who do not aspire to to them, or at least think them admirable, are savages or enemies.”

Amiri Baraka book Blues People

The idea that Western thought might be exotic if viewed from another landscape never presents itself to most Westerners.
Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), p. 8

“We cannot force love. It is an instinctive trait that has its own way of thinking and will.”

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