This Continent Called Love:
500 Quotations on Love from Nobel Prize Winners
Compiled by David Pratt
Published by Bev Editions at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 David Pratt
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Section 1:This Continent Called Love
Section 2: Love Is or it Ain’t
Section 4: The Supreme Misfortune
Section 5: Friendship is the Only Cement
Section 6: He Kissed me and Now I am Someone Else
Section 7: To Live is to Desire
Section 8: Eros, Intermediary between Gods and Men
Section 9: The Most Beautiful of Miracles
Section 10: The Troubled Partnership
Section 11: A Happy Family is but an Earlier Heaven
Section 12: No Greater Joy than to Live Alone
Section 13: Sweet is the Land Where one is Born
Section 14: Those whose Work and Pleasure are One
Section 15: To teach and to Love Intensely
Section 17: All Works of Love are Works of Peace
Section 18: Yield Nothing on the Plane of Freedom
Section 19: Art is Always in the Service of Beauty
Section 20: A Soul that Comes Nearer to Truth
Section 21: The Norm is Compassion
Section 22: More Things to Admire in Men than to Despise
Section 23: The Grace of God is Glue
Section 24: Life is Energy in Flower
Section 25: A Contemporary of the Rose
“No one will ever know,” wrote the German novelist Heinrich Böll, “how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having turned out to be totally investigated.” Part of the paradox of love is its immeasurability, its elusiveness of definition, the variety of its objects and manifestations. This book collects the observations on love of 166 recipients of the Nobel Prize, a group that includes some of the most distinguished minds of the last hundred years.
We may take it that Nobel laureates are no more immune than ordinary mortals to the experience of deep attachment, and to the resultant sense of heightened well-being, that we call love. Indeed, without such passion for their chosen field of endeavour, they would be unlikely to realize the achievements that result in the Nobel Prize. The novelist Ivo Andric remarked that “Every working day is a celebration for me,” and with this sentiment most Nobel laureates from every field would agree.
In the popular mind, love refers primarily to romantic love, a frequent subject in the work of recipients of the Nobel prize for literature. A substantial part of this book is devoted to their observations of interpersonal love, both romantic and erotic. If the scientists write less on this topic, it is because their primary commitments are elsewhere; nevertheless, it is worth noting how frequent are successful marriages among the science prize winners. In the first century of the prize, the divorce rate among recipients of the prizes for Chemistry, Medicine, and Physics, was less than 7 per cent; for the Literature laureates it was 23 per cent. The stability of a happy marriage is no doubt a factor in professional success. So thought Linus Pauling, who won two Nobel prizes; he advised those seeking a career in science to “get married young, and stay married.” Winston Churchill would have agreed. Referring to the family home of the Marlboroughs, he wrote: “At Blenheim I took two very important decisions: to be born and to marry. I am happily content with the decision I took on both those occasions.”
If the laureates are deeply attached to their partners, families, and homes, they are no less attached to their homeland. This is not necessarily the land of their birth; indeed, exile and immigration are common experiences of Nobel laureates. Many Israeli laureates immigrated from less congenial countries. Even more future laureates left Europe for Britain and America during the 1930s. Prior to the rise of Adolf Hitler, German Nobel prizes in the sciences outnumbered those awarded to Americans by 2:1; since Hitler, this ratio has been reversed. Laureates from Albert Einstein to Henry Kissinger have written movingly of the safety and freedom they found in their new homeland. Following World War II, a new flood of refugees left the countries of Eastern Europe for the West, among them the writers Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and their feelings for the places they left, and that to which they came, permeate their writing.
In the pages of this book will be found many and varied observations on love by Nobel laureates; by writers of their love of writing and particularly of poetry; by scientists of experiment and discovery; by peace laureates of justice and freedom; by academic laureates of their students and of teaching; and by laureates from all fields of relationships, of humanity, and of the natural world. Among Nobel laureates there are few cynics and few pessimists, and this is as Alfred Nobel would have wished. The creations of literature laureates have given us a fuller depiction of the human passions. The dedication of recipients of the prize for peace has prevented or resolved much human conflict. The achievements of the scientists have illuminated the wonders of nature, and their technical results have enhanced human potential and reduced burdensome toil. And the discoveries of the laureates in medicine have provided treatment for many hitherto intractable diseases. Perhaps more than any other community of individuals, the Nobel laureates, still fewer than one thousand in number, have illuminated human love and mitigated the obstacles that stand in its way.
No one will ever know how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having turned out to be totally investigated.
Heinrich Böll
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1972
Nobel Lecture, 2 May 1973
That great ambivalence, love.
Patrick White
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1973
The Twyborn Affair, 1979
Love is an endless mystery for it has nothing else to explain it.
Rabindranath Tagore
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1913
Fireflies, 1928
The human heart is the same everywhere in the world.
Pearl Buck
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1938
The People of Japan, 1966
A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.
Nelson Mandela
Nobel Prize for Peace, 1993
Long Walk to Freedom
The human hand is meant for embracing and not for hitting.
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama
Nobel Prize for Peace, 1989
Attributed
Wisdom is not in reason, but in love.
André Gide
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1947
Fruits of the Earth, 1897
In the security bred of many harmless marriages, it had been forgotten that love is no hothouse flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed, but, flower or weed, whose scent and color are always wild!
John Galsworthy
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1932
The Man of Property, 1906
I believe that love invariably leads us aright…But it takes great courage and faith to obey its promptings, and that, alas, is what we all lack.
Selma Lagerlöf
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1909
Memories of my childhood, 1934
Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
Boris Pasternak
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1958
Dr. Zhivago, 1957
No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.
W. B. Yeats
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1923
Vacillation, in The Winding Stair, 1933
A man is what he loves. That’s why he loves it: because he is a part of it.
Joseph Brodsky
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1987
On Grief and Reason, 1995
The duty of each of us is not only to love others, but also and especially to make oneself worthy to be loved by others.
Alexis Carrel
Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1912
Joseph T. Durkin, Hope for our Time: Alexis Carrel on Man and Society, 1965
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
T. S. Eliot
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1948
East Coker, in Four Quartets, 1943
It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Nobel Prize for Peace, 1961
Quoted in Beca Lewis, The Shift to Spiritual Perception, 2002
It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.
André Gide
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1947
Attributed
Happy Birthday Mrs. Chown! Tell your son to stop trying to fill your head with science—for to fill your heart with love is enough!
Richard Feynman
Nobel Prize for Physics, 1965
Letter to Mrs. Chown, whose son Marcus had tried to enlist Feynman to encourage his mother’s interest in science, which had been piqued by watching Feynman on TV. Christopher Sykes, Ed., No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman, 1994
If there is any substitute for love, it’s memory; to memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.
Joseph Brodsky
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1987
New York Review of Books, 1981
There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
Martin Luther King
Nobel Prize for Peace, 1964
Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963
Millions of human beings long for love, but the word is only uttered in the most sordid realms of journalism.
Eugenio Montale
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1975
Poet in Out Time, 1976
We have an Arabic saying, “There can be no love except after enmity.”
Anwar Al-Sadat
Nobel Prize for Peace, 1978
Those I have Known, 1984
We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies, there would be very few people whom we should love.
Bertrand Russell
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950
Nobel Acceptance Speech, 10 December 1950
Can I make myself love? No one ever could since the world began.
John Galsworthy
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1932
The Dark Flower, 1913
Can you love me while I have a full stomach and you are hungry?
Nadine Gordimer
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1991
Living in Hope and History, 1999
One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.
Gabriel García Márquez
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1982
Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.
Martin Luther King
Nobel Prize for Peace, 1964
Wall Street Journal, 13 November 1962
Why should love only be healed by love?
Selma Lagerlöf
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1909
Gosta Berling’s Saga, 1924
There are people who love me very much (there are very few of them), and my heart is in debt to them. For them I write this novel.
Boris Pasternak
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1958
Letter to Olga Freidenberg, 1 October 1948. In Edith W. Clowes, Ed., Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, 1995
Love is the recognition, in the beloved person, of that gift of flight that characterizes all human creatures.
Octavio Paz
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990
The Double Flame, 1993
Love and politics are the two extremes of human relationships: what is public and what is private, the town square and the bedroom, the group and the couple. Love and politics are two poles linked by an arch: the person.
Octavio Paz
Nobel Prize for Literature1990
Itinerary, 1994
If love is in bad shape now, it’s because politics is in bad shape—because the notion of human beings has been degraded. We’re told that the important thing is to make love well. But that is technique. Love is more than technique. Imagination plays a very important part in love and politics, and without imagination in both, we have this catastrophe of modern life.
Octavio Paz
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990
Quoted in Obituary, Washington Post 22 April 1998
A loving heart is an inventive one.
Dominique Pire
Nobel Prize for Peace, 1958
Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1958
Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.
Toni Morrison
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1993
Beloved
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
Elie Wiesel
Nobel Prize for Peace, 1986
US News and World Report, 27 October 1986
I have always preferred the folly of the passions to the wisdom of indifference.
Anatole France
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1921
The Crime of Sylvester Bonnard, 1881