So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in their mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists.
Interpretation
Psychologists struggle to fully understand and articulate love, a task better suited to poets and novelists.
Harry Harlow's quote highlights the limitations of psychology in understanding the complexity of love and affection. Despite scientific observation and analysis, the essence of love is often better captured through art, literature, and poetry, suggesting that emotional experiences transcend rational explanation.
In practice
During a wedding toast to emphasize the power of love beyond scientific understanding.
Love, love, love – all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.
The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.
For Chelsea, I would turn down every job in the world.
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
O love, be moderate, allay thy ecstasy, In measure rain thy joy, scant this excess!
To allot God a secondary place in life was, to me, inconceivable. Though He is the sole Owner of the cosmos, silently showering us with gifts from life to life, one thing yet remains which He does not own, and which each human heart is empowered to withhold or bestow - man's love.
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