#quotablequotes — Public Fediverse posts

This Business of Love — Claude Comments

“When we ourselves do not love everyone, why we should expect or want everyone to love us?”

Claude Comments:

There’s a real insight here, and it sits nicely alongside your recent aphorisms on love — but let me engage with both the thought and the phrasing honestly.

The idea. The aphorism works as a mirror-argument: it exposes a common asymmetry in the human heart. We ration our own love carefully — extending it to those who please us, withholding it from those who don’t — yet we feel wounded, even indignant, when the world doesn’t love us universally. Pointing out that hypocrisy has genuine force, and it has good lineage: it echoes the Gospel’s “why beholdest thou the mote in thy brother’s eye,” and in the Advaitic register it gestures at the ego’s structure — the ahamkara demands from the world what it refuses to give, precisely because it experiences itself as the centre and others as periphery.

A philosophical wrinkle worth considering. As stated, the aphorism could be read two ways, and they lead in opposite directions:

1. Deflationary reading: “Lower your expectations — you don’t love everyone, so don’t expect universal love.” This counsels realism, a kind of stoic adjustment.
2. Aspirational reading: “The remedy for craving universal love is to become universal love yourself.” This is the Advaitic/Christian direction — when one abides as the Self, the question of receiving love dissolves because the lover/beloved division dissolves.

The aphorism currently states only the diagnosis, not which cure you intend. That’s not necessarily a flaw — good aphorisms often leave the reader at the fork — but you might consider whether a companion aphorism could supply the second movement. Something in the spirit of: the demand to be loved is the ego’s business; the capacity to love is the Self’s nature. Nisargadatta’s line comes to mind here — that wisdom says “I am nothing,” love says “I am everything.” Your aphorism sits in the gap between those two.

One small counterpoint to test it against. A critic might say: wanting to be loved isn’t hypocrisy, it’s simply need — the infant wants love before it can give any. The aphorism treats an existential hunger as if it were a logical inconsistency. I think the aphorism survives this objection (its target is expectation and demand, not the bare wish), but the word “want” slightly weakens it, because wanting love isn’t blameworthy in the way expecting it is. You might consider whether “expect or demand” is tighter than “expect or want.”

The phrasing. Two small edits:

• Word order: “why should we expect” rather than “why we should expect.”
• “When” could arguably be “If” — “When” implies the condition always holds (true enough of most of us, but “If” makes it a cleaner logical hinge and less accusatory toward the reader).

So a polished version might read:

“If we ourselves do not love everyone, why should we expect everyone to love us?”

Or, if you want to keep the softer double verb: “…why should we expect, or even want, everyone to love us?” — the “even” acknowledges that wanting is more forgivable than expecting.

Love & Truth

“To begin to understand love is to begin to understand the truth.”

Love & Lust

“Love is one way to conquer lust. Actually, love is a good and pleasant way to conquer many evils in ourselves. Never ever underestimate love, not even romantic love.”

Do The Needful

“End the dream before life ends.”

The Divided Self

“We tend to compartmentalize our self. Like for instance, we try to be the tough-minded boss at work, and the tender-hearted husband/parent at home. This shows we have not understood life and so we complicate life for ourselves and others.”

Salvation

“In sacrificing your own salvation for the sake of another, you will attain salvation more quickly.”

Love Vs. Understanding

“Sometimes I wonder if it is the case that in my life there are two kinds of people: (1) Those who love me, (2) Those who understand me, and these sets seem to be mutually exclusive.”

Do Others Understand Us

“It is so damn difficult to find someone who understands you as well as you understand yourself, unless we are talking about your therapist because the therapist understands you better than you understand yourself.”

The Stupidity of People

“People are stupid in that they think there are only physical laws governing this universe, without countenancing the fact that there are also psychological laws, moral laws, metaphysical laws, ontological laws, karmic laws, etc. People are stupid.”

Sciences as Merely Palliative

“All the sciences, be they natural or social sciences, can help humanity only partially because they can only help one alleviate the symptoms, and that, too, only temporarily because as long the disease called ignorance festers inside, it will keep producing some new symptom or the other to which the scientists have to keep responding anew. What is that ignorance? Think and find out.”

Sciences as Merely Palliative

“All the sciences, be they natural or social sciences, can help humanity only partially because they can only help one alleviate the symptoms, and that, too, only temporarily because as long the disease called ignorance festers inside, it will keep producing some new symptom or the other to which the scientists have to keep responding anew. What is that ignorance? Think and find out.”

Sciences as Merely Palliative

“All the sciences, be they natural or social sciences, can help humanity only partially because they can only help one alleviate the symptoms, and that, too, only temporarily because as long the disease called ignorance festers inside, it will keep producing some new symptom or the other to which the scientists have to keep responding anew. What is that ignorance? Think and find out.”

Sciences as Merely Palliative

“All the sciences, be they natural or social sciences, can help humanity only partially because they can only help one alleviate the symptoms, and that, too, only temporarily because as long the disease called ignorance festers inside, it will keep producing some new symptom or the other to which the scientists have to keep responding anew. What is that ignorance? Think and find out.”

Sciences as Merely Palliative

“All the sciences, be they natural or social sciences, can help humanity only partially because they can only help one alleviate the symptoms, and that, too, only temporarily because as long the disease called ignorance festers inside, it will keep producing some new symptom or the other to which the scientists have to keep responding anew. What is that ignorance? Think and find out.”

Fear of Dying

“Most of the world drama is driven by the fear of dying.”

Fear of Dying

“Most of the world drama is driven by the fear of dying.”

Love is a Manifestation of the Truth

“What is love but one of the purest ways truth manifests in this world of duality.”

Love is an All-Or-None Phenomenon

“Love is an all-or-none phenomenon. Either you have it or you don’t. And once you have it, you cannot exercise choice as to who you will love and who you will not because just like a flower cannot help but emit the perfume to everyone around, you cannot but keep expressing the love that is in you towards everyone.”

Life is simple, but…

“Life is simple. But simplicity bores the hell out of us, hence this world drama.”

Few More Sayings

“She was wearing the rose in her hair, and I was brushing off the snow from my jacket.”

“Sometimes freedom throws itself around your arms as unrequited love.”

“In friendship there is a giving without any expectation and a receiving without any obligation.”

“It is so sad that till now I have recognized instantly every friend I have met no matter how long it was since we last met.”

“One kind of bad karma, there are many kinds mind you, is when people start laughing more at you than at your jokes.”

“Gandhi is supposed to have said, ‘My life is my message.’ I, not being so profound, can only say, ‘My life is my joke’.”

“Ghar waapsi karna chahta hoon. Lekin kitna bi sonchoo ya dhoondoon pata hi nahi lag raa ghar ka pataa.”

“Hell is your underemployed and unmarried friend with access to WhatsApp.”

“Do not ruin the present by trying to make the future brighter. Light the candle now, and read in its soft glow, now, this moment, do not postpone.”

“Women contain men — wo(men) — confine them, restrict them, enclose them, imprison them, not in the tight embrace of their arms but merely parenthetically.”

“No one here on earth can understand God because we can never love one another with a love that passeth understanding.”

“When I cannot understand even her, how can I hope to understand God.”

“Those who read history carefully, will find it difficult to believe in the existence of God.”

“Jesus might as well have said love thy wife as thyself, for the wifey is one’s most immediate and present neighbour, much to the consternation of some husbands.”

A Few Sayings

“Buddha misread the origins of suffering. The cause of suffering is God’s desire to appear as this creation.”

“This is the mistake we keep making that we seek the truth with our mind and love with our heart, without realizing that only when we set aside the mind and heart will we find the truth and love that we seek.”

“When you set aside the mind and heart, you reach that state of aloneness that is also oneness in which there can be no loneliness.”

“The longing for the home is the cause for all the strife in this world. To feel at home anywhere and everywhere is freedom.”

“Morality is duality. Recognize God in and as not only the good and virtuous but also as the bad and wicked.”

“The world is not merely that which is revealed by the microscope and telescope.”

“Hum bahut kuch pade hai, aur abh uljhan may pade ahi.”

“One of the advantages of being a theist is that one can leave the bloody work of revolutions to God, trusting he will bring them about in his own inimitable ways, and rest comfortably in one’s drawing room, reading The Motorcycle Diaries.”

A Few Sayings

“Buddha misread the origins of suffering. The cause of suffering is God’s desire to appear as this creation.”

“This is the mistake we keep making that we seek the truth with our mind and love with our heart, without realizing that only when we set aside the mind and heart will we find the truth and love that we seek.”

“When you set aside the mind and heart, you reach that state of aloneness that is also oneness in which there can be no loneliness.”

“The longing for the home is the cause for all the strife in this world. To feel at home anywhere and everywhere is freedom.”

“Morality is duality. Recognize God in and as not only the good and virtuous but also as the bad and wicked.”

“The world is not merely that which is revealed by the microscope and telescope.”

“Hum bahut kuch pade hai, aur abh uljhan may pade ahi.”

“One of the advantages of being a theist is that one can leave the bloody work of revolutions to God, trusting he will bring them about in his own inimitable ways, and rest comfortably in one’s drawing room, reading The Motorcycle Diaries.”

"The outline of a pine tree on a northern twilight sky is better than therapy for me." -- Sarah Bessey

#QuotableQuotes #NeverABadSunset #SunsetPhotgraphy #YEGPhotographer #CanadianPhotographer

"The outline of a pine tree on a northern twilight sky is better than therapy for me." -- Sarah Bessey

#QuotableQuotes #NeverABadSunset #SunsetPhotgraphy #YEGPhotographer #CanadianPhotographer