"What is love?"

1. "Love is the answer to the problem of loneliness because it is only in love that i find at-onement and still remain myself"

2. "Love is an active power in man, power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellowmen, which unites him with others, love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet, it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love, the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two."

3. "And love is the experience of this depth and mystery of the other and the firm will to be for him."

4. "...even if i have satisfied the request of the other, he may go away dissatisfied because my heart was not in it."

5. "While it is true that i need an attitude that has broken away from self-preoccupation to see the appeal of the other, the converse also holds: the appeal of the other which is himself enables me to liberate myself from my narrow self. It reveals to me an entirely new dimension of my existence, that perhaps my self-realization may be a destiny-for-you. Because of you,I understand the meaningless of my egoism.

6. Perhaps, I am not meant to be alone, perhaps I can only be truly myself with you."

7. "Compatibility is not necessarily love. Neither is submission necessarily love, sometimes, refusing the request of the other may be the only way of loving the person in a situation, if satisfying it would bring harm to the person."

8. "When I love the other, I am saying 'I want you to become what you want to be. I want you to relaize your happiness freely'."

9. "To love the other is to labor for that love, to care for his body, his world, his total well-being."

10. "Love then necessitates a certain personal knowledge of the other."

11. "The temptation is also very great that I may impose my own concept of happiness on the other. I can go on laboring for the happiness of the other, where in reality I am simply fulfilling my own needs."

12. "The other has become an extension of myself and has become absorbed by my own person. If love is not to be become domination, it must be balanced by a certain respect, respect for the uniqueness and otherness of the other.

13. Respect does not mean idolizing a person; it simply means accepting the person as he is, different from myself."

14. "Patience requires a lot of waiting and catching-up, a waiting that is active, ever-ready to answer to needs of the other, and catching up that is spontaneous and natural."

15. "I offer myself to him by placing a limitless trust in the other."

16. "It is compelling, dominating or possessing the other."

17. "Love wants the other's freedom: that the other I come to fulfill and love myself."

18. "The joy i first experience in life is the joy of being loved."

19. "there exist in loving the other the desire to be loved in return."

20. "The desire is essential but should never become the motive for loving, otherwise I am 'loving' the other not for what he is but for what I can get in return, for myself."

21. "The primary motive for loving the other is thus the other himself, the YOU. The 'you' is not a 'he' or 'she' I talk about. The 'you' is not just another self (just a rose among the other roses, a fox among other foxes), but the you-for-whom-I-care. The YOU in love is discovered by the lover himself. It is not that the lover is lover is blind to the objective qualities of the other but that he is clear that the other is over and above his qualities."

22. "The motive of love is the YOU that is seen not only by the eyes or mind but more by the heart. 'I love you because you are beautiful and lovable, and you are beautiful and lovable because you are you."

23. "Since the 'you' is another subjectivity, he is free to accept or reject my offer. This is the risk of loving, that the other may reject or betray the self I have offered to him."

24. "The experience of being rejected can be an emptying of oneself which would allow room in oneself for development. In this sense, an unreciprocated love can still be an enriching experience."

25. "No shop in the world that sells love."

26. "When love is reciprocated, love becomes fruitful, love becomes creative."

27. "The union in love, however, does not involve the loss of identities. The 'I', the 'you' an other. We become more of ourselves by loving each other. This is the paradox in love, the many in one, one in many--poet EE Cummings."

28. "one's not half two it's two that are halves of one."

29. "Love is essentially a disinterested giving of myself to the other as other. The giving in love is not a giving up nor the giving in love the giving of the marketing character because as we have said, in love I do not give in order to get something in return."

30. "To give myself in love is not so much to give of what I have as of what I am and can become."

31. "But why this particular other? Why did I choose you and not some other? Because you are lovable, and you are lovable because you are you. I see a certain value in you, and I want to enhance and be part of that value?"

32. "The value of the other is the value of his being a unique self. In a sense then, everyone is valuable and consequently lovable because everyone is unique, original, irreducible and one of its kind. Thus, if I am capable of loving-this particular person for what he is, I am capable too of loving the others for what they are."

33. "Is easy to love mankind in general but so difficult to love unique individual persons"

34. "TO LOVE IS TO LOVE OTHER HISTORICALLY"

35. "the great thing in friendship is being equal to an inferior"

36. "The 'you' in love is indivisible and thus love is an undivided commitment to the other. it is offered from the totality of my being to the totality of the other's being."

37. "When I make friends with you, I do not say to you, let us be friends only for two year, for as long as we are in the same class. TRUE, friendships can be broken, yet people do not become friends on the understanding that they be friends only for a limited time. Love implies imorlatlity."

38. " in love, we catch a glimpse of eternity."

39. "True friends and lovers share secrets and intimacies not for public consumption."

from Phenomenology of Love by Manuel B. Dy, Jr.

WHAT LOVE IS NOT

40. "our heart is primarily destined to love"

41. "Love is not the same as benevolence because it is not necessary in love that we seek the material benefit of its object. When we love God, for instance, it would be ridiculous to be benevolent to him."
"Love is not"

42. "In fellow-feeling, we can rejoice over A's pleasure over B's misfortune, but in love we evaluate this as not in accordance with A's higher possibilities of being."

43. "Love is not a feeling because feeling is passive or receptive and reactive, whereas love is a spontaneous act and movement."

44. "We first love and only later give reasons for our love"

45. "The heart has its own reasons which reasons itself does not know"

46. "Love is not an intrinsically a social disposition like altruism"

47. ESSENCE OF LOVE

48. "The opposite of love is not hatred but indifference, because hatred like love is also an act and a movement, albeit in the opposite direction. Hatred is a disorder of the heart."

49. "In love, we don't discover values, we discover that everything is more valuable"

50. "Love is an intentional movement from a lower to a higher value of the object loved. Love is basically a movement."

From Max Scheler's Phenomenology of Love by Maneul Dy, Jr.