Love is a sign of our wretchedness. God can love only himself. We can love only something other than ourselves.
It is not because God loves us that we must love him. It is because God loves us that we must love ourselves. How could one love oneself without this motive?
Self-love is impossible for man, except by this detour.
If my eyes are bandaged and my hands chained to a stick, this stick separates me from things, but through it I explore them. I feel only the stick, I perceive only the wall. Likewise creatures for the faculty of love. Supernatural love touches only creatures and goes only to God. It loves only creatures (what else do we have to love?) but as intermediaries. In this respect, it loves all creatures equally, including oneself. To love a stranger as oneself implies as its counterpart: to love oneself as a stranger.
The love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal gratitude.
Love, in one who is happy, is to wish to share the suffering of the beloved who is unhappy.
Love, in one who is unhappy, is to be filled by the simple knowledge that the beloved is in joy, without sharing in that joy, nor even desiring to share in it.
In the eyes of Plato, carnal love is a degraded image of true love. Chaste human love (conjugal fidelity) is a less degraded image. The idea of sublimation could only have arisen in contemporary stupidity. Love of the Phaedrus. It neither exercises nor undergoes force. Therein lies the only purity. Contact with the sword carries the same defilement, whether from the side of the hilt or from the side of the blade. For one who loves, the cold of metal will not take away the love, but will give the feeling of being abandoned by God. Supernatural love has no contact with force, but neither does it protect the soul against the cold of force, the cold of iron. Only an earthly attachment, if it contains enough energy, can protect against the cold of iron. Armor is made of metal like the sword. For one who loves only with a pure love, murder chills the soul, whether one is its author or its victim, and everything that, without going as far as death itself, is violence. If one desires a love that protects the soul against wounds, one must love something other than God. Love tends to go ever further. But it has a limit. When the limit is exceeded, love turns to hatred. To avoid this transformation, love must become other. Among human beings, one fully recognizes the existence only of those one loves. The belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love. The mind is not compelled to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: see the Upanishads, the Taoists, and Plato, who all use this philosophical attitude as a purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the feeling of reality are identical. This need to be the creator of what one loves is a need to imitate God. But it is an inclination toward false divinity. Unless one has recourse to the model seen from the other side of heaven... Pure love of creatures: not love in God, but love that has passed through God as through fire. Love that detaches itself completely from creatures in order to ascend to God and descends again from him joined to the creative love of God. Thus are united the two contraries that tear human love apart: to love the beloved as he is and to wish to recreate him. Imaginary love for creatures. One is attached by a cord to all objects of attachment, and a cord can always be cut. One is also attached by a cord to the imaginary God, to the God for whom love is also attachment. But to the real God one is not attached, and that is why there is no cord that can be cut. He enters into us. He alone can enter into us. All other things remain outside, and we know of them only the tensions of varying degree and direction impressed upon the cord when there is movement of them or of us. Love needs reality. To love through a bodily appearance an imaginary being — what could be more atrocious, the day one realizes it? Far more atrocious than death, for death does not prevent the beloved from having existed.
It is the punishment for the crime of having fed love with imagination. It is a cowardice to seek from the people one loves (or to desire to give them) any other comfort than that which works of art give us, helping us by the simple fact that they exist. To love, to be loved — this only makes that existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind. But it must be present as the source of thoughts, not as their object. If there is reason to desire to be understood, it is not for oneself, but for the other, in order to exist for that person. Everything that is vile or mediocre in us revolts against purity and needs, to save its life, to defile that purity. To defile is to modify, to touch. The beautiful is what one cannot wish to change. To take power over is to defile. To possess is to defile. To love purely is to consent to distance, to adore the distance between oneself and what one loves. Imagination is always linked to a desire, that is, to a value. Only desire without an object is empty of imagination. There is real presence of God in everything that imagination does not veil. The beautiful captures the desire in us and empties it of its object by giving it a present object and thereby forbidding it to rush toward the future. Such is the price of chaste love. Every desire for enjoyment is situated in the future, in the illusory. Whereas if one desires only that a being exist, that being exists: what more then could one desire? The beloved is then naked and real, not veiled by an imaginary future. The miser never looks at his treasure without imagining it n times larger. One must be dead to see things naked.
Thus, in love, there is chastity or lack of chastity according to whether the desire is directed or not toward the future.
In this sense, and provided it is not directed toward a pseudo-immortality conceived on the model of the future, the love one bears the dead is perfectly pure. For it is the desire for a finite life that can no longer give anything new. One desires that the dead person existed, and he did exist.
Where the mind ceases to be a principle, it ceases also to be an end. Hence the rigorous connection between collective "thought" in all its forms and the loss of the sense of, and respect for, souls. The soul is the human being considered as having a value in himself. To love a woman's soul is not to think of that woman in terms of one's own pleasure, etc. Love no longer knows how to contemplate; it wants to possess (disappearance of Platonic love).
It is a fault to desire to be understood before having elucidated oneself in one's own eyes. It is to seek pleasures in friendship, and undeserved ones. It is something even more corrupting than love. You would sell your soul for friendship.
Learn to reject friendship, or rather the dream of friendship. To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship must be a gratuitous joy like those given by art or by life. One must refuse it in order to be worthy of receiving it: it belongs to the order of grace ("My God, withdraw from me..."). It is among those things that are given as a bonus. Every dream of friendship deserves to be shattered. It is not by chance that you have never been loved... To desire to escape from solitude is a cowardice. Friendship is not sought, not dreamed of, not desired; it is exercised (it is a virtue). Abolish all that margin of feeling, impure and turbid. Enough! Or rather (for one must not prune oneself too rigorously), everything in friendship that does not pass into actual exchanges must pass into considered thoughts. It is quite useless to do without the inspiring virtue of friendship. What must be severely forbidden is to dream of the pleasures of sentiment. That is corruption. And it is as stupid as dreaming about music or painting. Friendship does not let itself be detached from reality, any more than the beautiful does. It constitutes a miracle, like the beautiful. And the miracle consists simply in the fact that it exists. At twenty-five, it is high time to finish radically with adolescence... Do not let yourself be imprisoned by any affection. Preserve your solitude. The day, should it ever come, when a true affection would be given to you, there would be no opposition between inner solitude and friendship; on the contrary. It is even by this infallible sign that you would recognize it. Other affections must be severely disciplined. The same words (for example, a man says to his wife: I love you) can be vulgar or extraordinary depending on the manner in which they are spoken. And this manner depends on the depth of the region of being from which they proceed, without the will being able to do anything about it. And, by a marvelous accord, they go to touch, in the listener, the same region. Thus the listener can discern, if he has discernment, the worth of these words. Beneficence is permitted precisely because it constitutes a humiliation even greater than pain, a still more intimate and irrefutable trial of dependence. And gratitude is prescribed for this reason, because this is the use to be made of the benefit received. But it must be dependence on fate and not on a particular human being. That is why the benefactor has the obligation to be entirely absent from the benefit. And gratitude must not to any degree constitute an attachment, for that is the gratitude of dogs. Gratitude belongs first to the one who gives help, if the help is pure. It is owed by the recipient only as reciprocity. To feel pure gratitude (the case of friendship being set aside), I need to think that I am well treated not out of pity, or sympathy, or caprice, as a favor or privilege, nor by a natural effect of temperament, but out of a desire to do what justice requires. Therefore the one who treats me thus wishes that all who are in my situation be treated thus by all who are in his.