This Continent Called Love, Quotations from Nobel Prize Winners

By David Pratt

500 quotations on love in all its forms from Nobel Laureates. Combining love with wisdom, it will delight readers of all ages. Perfect for speeches at weddings and anniversaries. Send it to sweethearts, mothers, brides, and even to your favorite cynics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bev Editions
• Release date: Aug 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9780986728709

David Pratt

David Pratt is author of the Lambda-winning Bob the Book, Wallaçonia, Todd Sweeney, the Fiend of Fleet High, Looking After Joey, and a story collection, My Movie. His stories have appeared in several periodicals and anthologies. He has performed work for the theater at venues in New York City and Michigan and has published Two Plays: The Snow Queen and November Door. In 2020-2021 he published The Book of Humiliation, an "anti-novel" in 16 zines, designed by Michigan artist Nicholas Williams.

Book preview

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

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Contents

Introduction

Section 1:This Continent Called Love

Section 2: Love Is or it Ain’t

Section 3: Love Reciprocated

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 16: The Ultimate High

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

Index of Laureates

Introduction

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.

Section 1

This Continent Called Love

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