Love and desire are both thoroughly human. Our problem with them is that they orient us toward very different goals. Love seeks control, stability, continuity, certainty. Desire seeks surrender, adventure, novelty, the unknown. In love we are searching for points of attachment, anchoring, something we know we can count on. In desire we are searching both for missing, disowned pieces of ourselves and for something beyond ourselves, outside the borders of self-recognition that, under ordinary circumstances, we protect so fiercely. Erotic passion destabilizes one's sense of self. When we find someone intensely arousing who makes possible unfamiliar experiences of ourselves and an otherness we find captivating, we are drawn into the disorienting loopiness of self/other. We tend to want to control these experiences and the others who inspire them. Thus emotional connection tends to degrade into strategies for false security that suffocate desire.

Lovers alone wear sunlight.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

lovers alone wear sunlight

Love is like the rays of the sun, shining left, right, up, down, front, back, bathing everything in light

Love is an island in the setting sun

But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.

Love of beauty is really only the sex instinct, which nothing but complete union satisfies.

For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.

Love, that moves the sun and the other stars

A life of faith without love is like sunlight without warmth — the type of light that occurs in winter, when nothing grows and everything droops and dies. Faith rising out of love, on the contrary, is like light from the sun in spring, when everything grows and flourishes. Warmth from the sun is the fertile agent. The same is true in spiritual and heavenly affairs, which are typically represented in the Word by objects found in nature and human culture.

Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddam. [sic]

The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

Love is a vision, a firefly that majestically glows in the night for some time; then, it winks at you and swiftly disappears.