Love Meaning? Celebs, Spiritual Gurus And More Have Their Say

What is the meaning of love? That question has been asked seemingly since time immemorial and we are no closer to the answer it would seem than we have been from the time the first debates about love and it’s nature surfaced thousands of years ago.

It is one of the existentialist questions that remains the hardest to answer because it deals directly with an emotion and feeling that is so powerful and all conquering, but also so very personal and influenced by all sorts of internal factors like our upbringing, thought processes, culture etc.

East Versus The West

While both the east and the west may concur about the importance of love and how it can be found in things great and small, all of the scholarship that has come from the west and the east tend to be different in their approach to love.

While the west approaches love with a more scientific angle (not to say that the great continental and other philosophers have not dealt with the meaning of love at length) taking care to measure brain activity and what sections of the brain “light up” when it is presented with stimulus relating to people they love, the East tends to focus more on the philosophical and virtuous nature of love and it’s place, role and importance in our everyday lives.

That’s not to say both sides don’t very often arrive at the same conclusion, or even no conclusion at all. That said, love is felt in the everyday and you don’t have to belong to a particular class, caste, gender, area, age, skin colour or any other arbitrary group to experience, appreciate and enjoy it.

And considering it would be safe to say that 99 percent of the population living on the planet has had their experiences with being in love, they all come to their very own conclusion about what love really is, what it means and how it has affected them. Let’s take a look what some of the more famous amongst our fellow inhabitants have to say about love:

1.

This quote by Sadhguru talks of how one must fall in love with the emphasis being on the word “fall.” That’s because only when one is willing to lose some part of themselves do they fall in love – meaning that they are willing to destroy a part of themselves ion order to gain something from or for the other, meaning the realisation that something is more important than oneself has taken place.

2.

Sri Aurobindo explores the nature of love with this resounding quote that reminds us that most of the time what we construe as love is not actually love, it is a transaction. Sure, there may be many who have made excellent transactions in their lives, but those will always be more convenient rather than fulfilling. For true love – unconditional love – has the power to transform and transport you to another plane, convenient and transactional love does not.

[Read More: Does True Love Exist? 7 Facts That Scream “Yes!”]

3.

Taylor Swift’s candid take on what it’s like to be in love makes perfect sense to anyone who has, well, been in love! Even the smartest and most intelligent persons can see themselves acting in ways that they had never thought they would all because they have been hopelessly taken by the one thing it seems can defeat all reason – love.

4.

Lena Dunham has her say about the nature of love in your twenties. She argues that relationships at this time of one’s life are quite intense, but they’re not really filled with love, or if they are, they seem to be the exception rather than the norm. Either one is avoiding commitment altogether or one is aggressively trying to tie down the other. Honesty and communication can take a while to develop in her experience, which we’re sure many people will agree with.

5.

This anonymous quote makes very good sense to those who keep wondering what it is that makes them come back to their partners so loyally every single time. The fact is, love that doesn’t seem to have any rational bearing or basis, or even love that seems to be opposite to what reason and logic would dictate, seems to be the one that sticks around the longest – because the lovers were not doing it for some gain or transaction, other than just being with the other person.

6.

It was Gandhi who first uttered these famous words and did he make his point well. Love can only be love if it springs forth and nourishes without asking for or claiming anything. Love also means in many ways that you have to open yourself up, which means there is every chance that you might get hurt, but that is never on the lovers’ mind, resent and regret are not words familiar to him, and revenge is a concept that is best left to the movies. Love seeks no repentance or revenge.

7.

Diane Arbus seems to have understood and put into words the emotions that we all feel everyday bout this most confusing of states. Love is when you completely understand d and connect with another on a cosmic level, but where even the simplest clarification and misunderstanding can lead to a complete breakdown in communication and indeed the relationship, unless care is taken to prevent such an occurrence. Love is where we give so much and expect so little, but our expectations might be things that the other takes for granted – and those are the ones that hurt the most.

8.

Johnny Depp makes clear his feelings on the nature of “pure” love, choosing to state that most love that takes place between adults has been contaminated by some sort of transactional nature. Whether it is marriages made out of convenience or desperation, lust passing for love, an interplay of status and wealth when it comes to attraction or anything else, Depp says that we as humans aren’t capable of removing a selfish part of ourselves from love, and that only dogs and infants are capable of such a feat of pure love.

[Read More: When Love Is Not Enough – The Road Ahead!]

9.

Swami Vivekananda might not have been the first one to ever make this statement, but he definitely was the first one to drive it home. A proponent of peace and love amongst the east and the west, and indeed all of the peoples of the Earth, Vivekananda preached the concept of true love as he understood it, and one of the most basic tenets when it came to defining love was that to be in love meant to complete fully the other person, including their so called “flaws” and forgiving their past transgressions.

10.

Beyonce has her say on what it means to be in love by first clarifying that there will never be any love without trust. According to her, to love is to trust the other person implicitly, and to trust yourself to always act in the other person’s best interests and to never cause them any hurt. Only if there is such an understanding between a couple can there said to be any love between them, no amount of words or grand promises or actions will ever make up for a chasm in trust.

11.

Scarlett Johansson might be one of the most beautiful people on the planet, but it is her insight that will leave you the most spellbound. She explains one of the more central concepts to love: that which says if you don’t love yourself, your ability to love another is greatly diminished. Even if you manage to love another, your lack of self-love will lead to insecurities and self deprecation which in the long run will only serve to harm you and the relationship you share. To love another fully and completely, you must first love yourself.

12.

“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone,” says Brad Pitt, who talks about how forging a connection, a real connection with another human being on this planet is the only way to beat the loneliness of essentially being alone in this large and cold world. At first, we have our mother’s love, then we have our lovers and then we have our children, who then return to take care of us when we’re older, if you think about what Pitt says for a second, then you will realise that he is absolutely right in saying that love is the only thing that keeps us from being completely lonely.

13.

lao Tzu in his infinite wisdom has gives us more than a number of outstanding reflections of life and being, and this one is right up there with the best of them. Lao tzu was of the opinion that “Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the senses.” What he meant to say was that though there might be certain “afflictions” and “passions” that appeal to the various different senses and sensibilities of the human being, the case of love was the strongest since it affected one’s logic and reasoning, one’s heart and all of one’s senses. Such a powerful emotion and state of being has no other comparable rival.

14.

John Lennon might have said a lot of famous words over the course of his exemplary life, but these are the three that are among the most timeless of all his utterances. Of the opinion that love is but a humble promise, Lennon revolutionises our understanding of love by asking us a simple question – who is that to whom we make promises? To those we love And what if we are pressured or otherwise convinced to promise something – then it’s not a real promise and we don’t intend to keep it. It’s that simple. Expectation is something that one should never have in this crazy and uncertain world, but that’s exactly what lovers demand of each other every single day – promises.

[Read More: 9 Stages Of A Relationship Every Couple Will Go Through]

15.

Victor Hugo’s take on love is probably the most poetic and certainly our favourite from amongst this list. Why? Because it places love in it’s unique position in our lives – of the central attraction and that which is sweetest and is being looked for by everyone. Just like some other hard existential questions, we do not know why we are here, even as debate rages on as to how we got here. But what we do know is that in our short (in context of the earth’s age) lives, we look for prestige, power, money, experience, passion, thrill, comfort, but most of all, love. It is the solace, it is that which makes it all worthwhile.