For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
The message that 'love' will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture - like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.
One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.
Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.
To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
The continued propinquity of another human being cramps the style after a time unless that person is somebody you think you love. Then the burden becomes intolerable at once.
Manners are love in a cool climate.
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
What better proof of love can there be than money? A ten-shilling note shows incontrovertibly just how mad about you a man is.
While I have very little to say in favor of sex (it's vastly overrated, it's frequently unnecessary, and it's messy), it is greatly to be preferred to the interminable torments of romantic agony through which two people tear one another limb from limb while professing altruistic devotion.
