Dark Eros Quotes

“Again, even at the social and political level, the solution is to bring soul back by not denying the Sadeian shadow.”
― Thomas Moore, DARK EROS: Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life

“Repression maintains the church of the dark God.”
― Thomas Moore, DARK EROS: Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life

“Current popular advocates of spirituality might keep a volume of Sade next to books that sentimentalize the Mother Goddess, or try to redeem the pathologies of this life with belief in past lives, or seek to be spiritually germ-free and uncontaminated by modern culture, or search endlessly for methods of transcendence.”
― Thomas Moore, DARK EROS: Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life

“All spiritual effort, aiming at the highest values and aspirations, has within it the danger of excessive purity of intention.”
― Thomas Moore, DARK EROS: Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life

“Life itself is both caring and hostile. We are born astride a grave, the hopeful swell of life an inevitable move toward death.”
― Thomas Moore, DARK EROS: Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life

“Repression of the Sadeian imagination is a weak attempt to live without bondage, to be free of ties to ordinary life, to find some spiritual way that flies without strings attached”
― Thomas Moore, DARK EROS: Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life

“is only the endless ability of man to defend himself against self-knowledge that prevents the obvious confrontation of secularity with its own evil and that slows its dramatic passage toward its own idea.”
― Thomas Moore, DARK EROS: Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life

“The word intolerable,” he goes on, “means unendurable to the point where some change is compelled.” The intolerable image, therefore, is seen as a goad to change or as an opportunity for psychological movement.”
― Thomas Moore, DARK EROS: Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life

“In the face of the dark necessities that life presses upon us, the moralist squeezes his lips together stiffly, while the person who understands life’s dark requirements laughs in relief from moralism, in appreciation for the absurd, in the pleasures of power made accessible with the discovery of shadow.”
― Thomas Moore, DARK EROS: Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life

“We tend to think of pragmatism and literalism as the main enemies of imagination, but another challenge is the moral antagonism that sees fantasy, dream, and image as contrary to values of work and truth or that wants to judge images as good and appropriate. Imagination doesn’t need new ideas and cleverness nearly as much as it needs freedom from persecution. If there is any cruelty inherent in the work of the artist, it is the effort needed to keep imagination unfettered. Civilization hesitates to allow imagination to roam freely.”
― Thomas Moore, DARK EROS: Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life

“This pavilion has, in all, nothing but basements, a ground floor, an entresol, a first floor; above it there is a very thick roof covered with a large tray, lined with lead, filled with earth, and in which are planted evergreen shrubberies. (Justine, 579)”
― Thomas Moore, DARK EROS: Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life