“To love is to live.”

Humanity is, essentially, a race ruled by emotion . As human beings, our elevated level of consciousness both frees and binds us. Our ability to ruin ourselves is, thus, not limited to simply physical drawbacks, but also mental drawbacks as well. Because emotion rules us, we put entirely too much stock on it in the first place, when confronted with the idea that “to love is to live” one cannot help but wonder if this citation is truly a profound proclamation or rather a set of pious ramblings uttered by a fool who managed to trick other fools into believing it held any true meaning.

In reading it, one must first ask themselves what love or life truly are. These concepts are names given to ideals and sentiments so large that by all rights human beings have no true right to define them. Love and life are such broad expanses of subject that they aren’t definable. We only have a miniscule idea about what they could truly be, and the fact that there are 6 billion people on the planet, all of whom have experienced love and life differently, nothing concrete can come of it, and, thus, no concrete opinion can truly come of it.

On could argue that love encompasses all human capacity for good. One could say that love is a pure emotion. But love is not an emotion. When we try to show or define love, we do so in terms of material possessions, or in terms of need. Love, is, essentially, a need, or desire. Love is a concept or term given to the selfish greed and possessiveness that human beings have desperately attempted to paint in a positive light. How can this relate to life?

One could also claim that life encompasses all emotion, because life is the condition that allows us to feel in the first place. This could easily explain how the human ideal that love is an emotion led to the declaration that to love was to live. However, life has a different meaning in biological terms than in psychological, or even emotional terms. Living, as in breathing, having a pulse, having blood carry oxygen to all your necessities on a regular basis is entirely different than being mentally alive. If someone is in a car accident and is rendered incapable of speech or movement for the rest of their lives, are they still alive?

There is so much grey matter that encompasses this citation that it is, in the end, no more defined than anything else. The claim that love (if love is thought of as an emotion) is to live, is true under only the most obscure conditions. Thus, love can, very obscurely, be to live. But the real question is, can it go the other way around? How can one thing define another without the other encompassing the first? Is to live to love?