A General Theory of Love - Thomas Lewis  ## Metadata - Author: **Thomas Lewis** - Full Title: A General Theory of Love - Category: #books ## Highlights - Blaise Pascal wrote, The heart has itsreasons whereof Reason knows nothing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k405t4tbspanwtmz4js1dw3z)) - “Man is a credulous animal and must believe something, ” wrote Bertrand Russell. “In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k4065eqd6bm403kw9wyjgknp)) - The scientist and artist both speak to the turmoil that comes from having a triune brain. A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right thing, or to love the right person, or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. People lack this capacity not through a deficiency of discipline but because the jurisdiction of will is limited to the latest brain and to those functions within its purview ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k406fsqyp24kfpvbrb82ejy3)) - Poetry, a bridge between the neocortical and limbic brains, is simultaneously improbable and powerful. Frost wrote that a poem “begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k406hhvb7kj7zdpkjdqypk80)) - Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k406xyrfk4wptcxx1fbk51zb)) - The capacious and monocular neocortical brain tells us that ideas perpetuate civilization. The thick marble walls of libraries and museums protect our supposed bequest to future ages. How short a vision. Our children are the builders of tomorrow’s world—quiet infants, clumsy toddlers, and running, squealing second graders, whose pliable neurons carry within them all humanity’s hope. Their flexible brains have yet to germinate the ideas, the songs, the societies of tomorrow. They can create the next world or they can annihilate it. In either case, they will do so in our names. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k40755xwy0dnc6q0d725895r))