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If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond “Es muss sein!”
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions.
No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies.
The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.
What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.
His choice was not between playacting and action. His choice was between playacting and no action at all. There are situations in which people are condemned to playact.
Man is master and proprietor, says Descartes, whereas the beast is merely an automaton, an animated machine, a machina animata. When an animal laments, it is not a lament; it is merely the rasp of a poorly functioning mechanism. When a wagon wheel grates, the wagon is not in pain; it simply needs oiling. Thus, we have no reason to grieve for a dog being carved up alive in the laboratory.
Share with Sophomores for DN during Emotions of the Animal Kingdom research project
We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions—love, antipathy, charity, or malice—and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.
Her feeling was rather that, given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog, that oddity of human history probably unplanned by the Creator.
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
But most of all: No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.
And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
She had always secretly reproached him for not loving her enough. Her own love she considered above reproach, while his seemed mere condescension.
Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength
