“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an anim...”
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Work
<p><i>"We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves."</i></p><p>We hear often that love is patient and kind, not envious or prideful. We hear that human love is a reflection of divine love. We hear that God is love. But how do we understand its work in our lives, its perils and rewards? Here, the incomparable C. S. Lewis examines human love in four forms: affection, the most basic, general, and emotive; friendship, the most rare, least jealous, and, in being freely chosen, perhaps the most profound; Eros, passionate love that can run counter to happiness and poses real danger; charity, the greatest, most spiritual, and least selfish. Proper love is a risk, but to bar oneself from it--to deny love--is a damning choice. Love is a need and a gift; love brings joy and laughter. We must seek to be awakened and so to find an Appreciative love through which "all things are possible."</p><p>"<i>The Four Loves</i> deserves to become a minor classic as a modern mirror of our souls, a mirror of the virtues and failings of human loving." --<i>New York Times Book Review</i> </p><p>"Lewis has a keen eye, a large measure of human sympathy, wit, and a command of simple words." --<i>Times Literary Supplement</i> </p><p><b>C. S. (Clive Staples) Lewis</b> (1898-1963), one of the great writers of the twentieth century, also continues to be one of our most influential Christian thinkers. He wrote more than thirty books, both popular and scholarly, including The Chronicles of Narnia series, <i>The Screwtape Letters</i>, <i>The Four Loves</i>, <i>Mere Christianity</i>, and <i>Surprised by Joy</i>.
Quotes
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Clive Staples Lewis
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“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an anim...”
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“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
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“I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe...”
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“As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very ma...”
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“Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.”
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“The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our self...”
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“In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”
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“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we...”
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“Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless po...”
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“The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. IT is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no...”
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