What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard ShawRead
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote critiques the intensity and irrationality of romantic passion and the expectations of love commitments.
George Bernard Shaw highlights the absurdity of societal expectations surrounding romantic love and marriage. He points out that individuals often enter into lifelong commitments during a fleeting, intense emotional state, which may not reflect the stability and reality needed for a lasting partnership. The quote emphasizes the need for more realistic and grounded views on love and relationships.
Themes
LovePassionCommitmentMarriageRelationships
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a wedding speech to highlight the complexities of love.
More from George Bernard Shaw
All quotes βMarriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
George Bernard ShawRead
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
George Bernard ShawRead
Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
George Bernard ShawRead
Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.
George Bernard ShawRead
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
George Bernard ShawRead
Similar quotes
That kind of love - the kind you realize you already have by the life you've created together - that's the kind that lasts.
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Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.
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Come then, put away your sword in its sheath, and let us two go up into my bed so that, lying together in the bed of love, we may then have faith and trust in each other.
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To love! To surrender absolutely, to prostrate oneself before the divine image, to die a thousand imaginary deaths, to annihilate every trace of self, to find the whole universe embodied and enshrined in the living image of another! Adolescent, we say. Rot! This is the germ of the future life, the seed which we hide away, which we bury deep within us, which we smother and stifle and do our utmost to destroy as we advance from one experience to another and flutter and flounder and lose our way.
Henry MillerRead
...there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love *running*. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you've got, being patient and forgiving and... undemanding...maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.
Christopher McdougallRead
I am bewitched with the rogue's company. If the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I'll be hanged.
William ShakespeareRead