Thursday, August 27, 2009

some Clive wisdom...

So I've been reading Clive Staples "The Four Loves" this week, and I am in awe that I have never read it before. I am just about finished, and I am quite certain, once I flip the last page, I will turn back to the first one. It makes my mind spin with ideas...(as Clive is wont to do). So here is a quote from today, because it's a good one:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

- C.S. Lewis from The Four Loves

Don't worry, I'll probably try and lighten the mood for the next post. I see the direction this blog is taking. ha.

4 comments:

Spiro said...

hey! this is the quote i used the other day! (at which point you said, "oh man, i have yet to read that...")

Sharelle said...

i know spi - i read it, and thought: "hey i recognize that from somewhere".

i am so, so glad i have read it now...

Tyler said...

Ah, yes... love. Good topic my friend. Love is the centre and source of all being. Love is the only proper hermeneutic for seeking to understanding life. Love is the only appropriate response when encountering 'the other'. Yes, to love at all places one in a position of great vulnerability; but to not love at all is to not live at all.

afterthoughtcomposer said...

excellent. may have to quote that at some point in the future.