“To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession.”

from Love in the Western World

Comments: Click to comment

“Why should neurotic, selfish, immature people suddenly become angels when they fall in love?”

Comments: Click to comment

“What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering.”

from Love in the Western World

Comments: Click to comment

“The knowledge of true danger may cure us of false fears”

from Love in the Western World

Comments: Click to comment

“Happiness is indeed a Eurydice, vanishing as soon as gazed upon. It can exist only in acceptance, and succumbs as soon as it is laid claim to.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god.”

from Love in the Western World

Comments: Click to comment

“Passion and marriage are essentially irreconcilable. Their origins and their ends make them mutually exclusive. Their co-existence in our midst constantly raises insoluble problems, and the strife thereby engendered constitutes a persistent danger for every one of our social safeguards.”

from Love in the Western World

Comments: Click to comment

“A life allied with mine, for the rest of our lives... that is the miracle of marriage.”

from Love in the Western World

Comments: Click to comment

“Animals do feel like us, also joy, love, fear and pain but they cannot grasp the spoken word. It is our obligation to take their part and continue to resist the people who profit by them, who slaughter them and who torture them.”

from Love in the Western World

Comments: Click to comment

“Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Passion is by no means the fuller life which it seems to be in the dreams of adolescence, but is on the contrary a kind of naked and denuding intensity, verily, a bitter destitution, the impoverishment of a mind being emptied of all diversity, an obsession of the imagination by a single image.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Every wish to experience happiness, to have it at one's beck and call—instead of being in a state of happiness, as though by grace—must instantly produce an intolerable sense of want.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Tristan and Iseult do not love one another... Their need of one another is in order to be aflame, and they do not need one another as they are. What they need is not one another's presence, but one another's absence”

from Love in the Western World

Comments: Click to comment

“Few people would fall in love had they never heard of love.”

from Love in the Western World

Comments: Click to comment

“a myth is need to express the dark and unmentionable fact that passion is linked with death and involves the destruction of anyone yielding himself up to it with all his strength”

from Love in the Western World

Comments: Click to comment