Love in the Western World Quotes

“Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.”
― Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World

“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.”
― Denis De Rougemont, Love in the Western World

“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.”
― Denis De Rougemont, Love in the Western World

“[...] 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.”
― Denis De Rougemont, Love in the Western World

“The profane passion is something absurd, a kind of drug, a 'sickness of the soul', as the Ancients supposed, everybody is ready to grant, and moralists have said so ad nauseum; but in this age of novels and films, when all of us are more or less drugged, nobody will believe it, and the distinction is capital. The moderns, men and women of passion, expect irresistible love to produce some revelation either regarding themselves or about life at large. This is a last vestige of the primitive mysticism. From poetry to the piquant anecdote, passion is everywhere treated as an experience, something that will alter my life and enrich it with the unexpected, with thrilling chances, and with enjoyment ever more violent and gratifying. The whole of possibility opens before me, a future that assents to desire! I am to enter into it, I shall rise to it, I shall reach it in 'transports'. The reader will say that this is but the everlasting illusion of mankind, the most guileless and—notwithstanding all that I have said—the most 'natural'; for it is the illusion of freedom and of living to the dull. But really a man becomes free only when he has attained self-mastery, whereas a man of passion seeks instead to be defeated, to lose all self-control, to be beside himself and in ecstasy. And indeed he is being urged on by his nostalgia, the origin and end of which are unknown to him. His illusion of freedom springs from this double ignorance.”
― Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World

“So soon as passion goes beyond instinct and becomes truly itself, it tends to self self-description, either in order to justify or intensify its being, or else simply in order to keep going.”
― Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World

“The more a man is given to sentiment ,the more likely is he to be wordy and to speak well.”
― Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World

“Toda concepción dualista, digamos maniquea, ve en la vida la desgracia misma, y en la muerte el último bien, el perdón del pecado de haber nacido, la reintegración en el uno y en la luminosa indistinción.

Desde la tierra, por una gradual ascensión, por la muerte progresiva y voluntaria de la ascesis, podemos llegar a la Luz. Pero el fin del espíritu, su término, es también el finde la vida; la muerte. Eros, nuestro supremo Deseo, no exalta nuestros últimos deseos sino para sacrificarlos. 'El cumplimiento del Amor niega todo amor terrestre.
Su Felicidad niega toda felicidad terrestre. Considerado desde el punto de vista de la vida; semejante amor no es sino una total desgracia.”
― Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World

“This peculiar connexion between a certain view of woman and the European conception of war has had profound consequences for morality, education, and politics.”
― Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World