"Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all"
About this Quote
Kierkegaard makes love sound less like a feeling and more like a totalizing demand, the kind that reorganizes your life with the quiet force of a vow. “Love is all” isn’t Hallmark maximalism; it’s a philosophical provocation aimed at the modern temptation to treat love as one value among many, balanced against self-interest, reputation, and comfort. In his Christian existential frame, love isn’t a mood or preference but a task: the standard by which the self is measured and, uncomfortably, dismantled.
The line works because of its ruthless symmetry. Love “gives all” evokes generosity, but Kierkegaard immediately refuses the fantasy that giving is clean or cost-free. “And it takes all” flips the emotional valence: love is also dispossession. It demands time, ego, control, and the cherished illusion that you can remain untouched while being devoted. The subtext is anti-romantic in the most bracing way. If love is real, it will feel like loss as often as it feels like warmth, because it forces a reordering of priorities that the self experiences as subtraction.
Context matters: Kierkegaard wrote against both bourgeois complacency and the smooth, system-building confidence of Hegelian philosophy. He keeps dragging big abstractions back to lived inwardness, where choices bite. Here, the bite is this: love is not a supplement to a well-managed life. It is the wager that can claim the whole person - and if it doesn’t, it may not be love at all.
The line works because of its ruthless symmetry. Love “gives all” evokes generosity, but Kierkegaard immediately refuses the fantasy that giving is clean or cost-free. “And it takes all” flips the emotional valence: love is also dispossession. It demands time, ego, control, and the cherished illusion that you can remain untouched while being devoted. The subtext is anti-romantic in the most bracing way. If love is real, it will feel like loss as often as it feels like warmth, because it forces a reordering of priorities that the self experiences as subtraction.
Context matters: Kierkegaard wrote against both bourgeois complacency and the smooth, system-building confidence of Hegelian philosophy. He keeps dragging big abstractions back to lived inwardness, where choices bite. Here, the bite is this: love is not a supplement to a well-managed life. It is the wager that can claim the whole person - and if it doesn’t, it may not be love at all.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
|---|---|
| Source | Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1847) — commonly translated line: "Love is all; it gives all, and it takes all." |
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