Quotessence
Home / Books / Love and will

Love and will

Book by Rollo May · 8 quotes · Philosophy, Existentialism, Psychology

Filter quotes by topic

Love and will Quotes

“What is love? He is neither mortal nor immortal, but a mean between the two. He is a great spirit (daimon) and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides men and gods, and therefore in him all is bound together. — Diotima (quoted by Socrates)”

“Eros is the drive for union and reproduction in the biological realm. Even in the birds and animals, we see the "desire of procreation," and they are "in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union." Human beings are changing all the time—hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same. Now in all this change, what binds the diversity together? It is eros, the power in us yearning for wholeness, the drive to give meaning and pattern to our variegation, and integration to counter our disintegrative trends. It is a dimension of experience which is psychological and emotional as well as biological. This is eros.”

“The day when a woman enjoys her first love cuts her in two. The man is the same after his first love as he was before. The woman is from the day of her first love another. That continues so all through life. The man spends a night by a woman and goes away. His life and body are always the same. The woman conceives. As a mother she is another person than the woman without child. She carries the fruit of the night nine months long in her body. Something grows. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even though her child die, though all her children die. For at one time she carried the child under her heart. And it does not go out of her heart ever again. Not even when it is dead. All this a man does not know. He does not know the difference before love and after love, before motherhood and after motherhood. Only a woman can know that and speak of that. She must always be maiden and always be mother. Before every love she is maiden, after every love she is mother." — An Abyssinian Noblewoman”

“We can no longer postpone the challenging question, How does one know that among the bedlam of voices which beset us all, one is really hearing his daimon? Inner 'voices'—experienced as actual or metaphorical ones—are notoriously untrustworthy; they can tell one anything. Many people hear voices, but there are few Joans of Arc. How about our schizophrenic patients who are instructed by their voices to bomb New York?”