Conditions of Love Quotes

“Imagination paints a charming view of the future, conveniently adapted to the demands of our current emotion.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy

“A relationship does not start the day two people meet; it starts in the childhood of each partner. For it is long before they meet that the template of their relationship is established.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy

“We need to be free if we are to love.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy

“This is the internal tragedy of love. If love is successful, if our love is returned and develops into a relationship, the person we are with must turn out to be other than we imagined them to be. Love craves closeness, and closeness always brings us face to face with something other than we expected.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy

“Compatibility, on this view, is an achievement of love, not a precondition for love.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy

“What is given by nature is not necessarily good, what is achieved by artifice is not necessarily worthless.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy

“Imagination need not stand as an obstacle to clear-sighted perception; on the contrary, it can be a prerequisite for recognition of the less obvious aspects of what is really there.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy

“Love can sometimes rise up like a desperate cry from a neglected part of oneself which takes a long view but which is submerged by the presence of strident wants.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy

“It is not suffering as such that makes someone appreciate love, it is only when suffering pierces our vanity—which happens when we do not blame someone else for our pain—that it awakens a deeper respect for love.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy

“When we try to love we are not actually trying to undertake a single endeavor; rather, we are trying to do a whole range of different, and sometimes not very compatible, things simultaneously.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy

“But mostly what we think of as the 'meaning' of life concerns the style of the private autobiography we each write and which records how we 'see' ourselves. Whether this autobiography reads as a narrative of progress in which difficulties are transcended, or is chaotic, is the test of whether one's life seems to be meaningful or not. Meaning is something we find, or fail to find, as we follow through this project. We can see how love figures here: love is a major theme, but how we see our experience of love depends upon our general thinking. If, for example, we work with extremely high expectations of love we impose a tragic style upon our self-perceptions: for our experience of love will always be seen under an aspect of failure—failure focused upon ourselves or others. Hence the more subtle our thinking about love, the more intelligently we discriminate ideals from reality, the more interesting our autobiography becomes.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy

“Sincerity is only as good as what we are sincere about.”
― John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy