Literary notes about affection (AI summary)
Literary works employ "affection" to evoke a range of emotions and social ties, from tender personal bonds to complex moral and societal obligations. In one narrative, it underscores a sublime quality that merges beauty, youth, and learning [1], while another portrays it as a loyalty owed even under the threat of self-destruction [2]. At times, affection appears as mutual, passionate love that forms the basis of lifelong commitment [3], and elsewhere it is defined by restraint necessary in familial or social duties [4, 5]. Moreover, some authors use the term to cast a critical light on transactional relationships and questionable motives [6, 7], highlighting its versatility as a mirror of the multifaceted human experience.
- She seems indeed to deserve a perpetual affection; beauty, youth, and learning, all that can make a person valuble, meet in her.
— from Letters of Abelard and Heloise by Peter Abelard and Héloïse - If Julian complied with the orders which he had received, he subscribed his own destruction, and that of a people who deserved his affection.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon - After this proof of mutual affection, what could they resolve?—to dedicate their future lives to love!
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Their first attachment took its rise in mutual affection, in community of honourable feelings; therefore this affection is lasting.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - I now allude to that part of Dr. Gregory's treatise, where he advises a wife never to let her husband know the extent of her sensibility or affection.
— from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft - “It is hideous, is it not,” she cried, “to speak in a breath of money and affection.
— from Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac - There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection must rest on circumstantial evidence.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana
