Lewis on love

These two quotes are probably my favourite to date and I have meant to post them for quite some time but was waiting to finish and post my condensed version of the third chapter of The Four Loves first (this is from the fourth chapter) but they're so good that, on the one hand, I can wait no longer to post them (who knows how long it will take me) and, on the other hand, if I do end up re-posting them along with the rest of that chapter, people have the opportunity to read it twice (something worth doing!). So here they are, set apart from the rest of the chapter:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all dangers and perterbations of love is Hell.

And, coming in a close second in both merit and location on the page is the following:

We shall draw near to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

Actually, I'll throw in this final one since it follows from these two and is quite good too:

It is probably impossible to love any human being simply "too much". We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the inordinacy.
-C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves from the chapter: "Charity"