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R Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with R. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All R Quotes

“Romantic Art: The Hearts Awakening - Bouguereau At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.”

“romantic consumerism. ‘my needs aren’t being met,’ ‘this marriage is not working for me anymore,’ ’it’s not the deal i signed up for’ - these are laments i hear regularly in my sessions. as psychologist and author Bill Doherty observes, these kinds of statements apply the values of consumerism - ‘personal gain, low cost, entitlement, and hedging one’s bets - to our romantic connections’. (…) in our consumer society, novelty is key.”

“Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins. Not only adult men, but also women and children, are recognised as individuals. Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying economic and legal rights independently of their family and community. They may hold their own bank accounts, decide whom to marry, and even choose to divorce or live on their own. But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state? The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.”

“Romantic love has highs and lows and lots of rare emotions and dangerous sensations but it bores easily and has no friendship in it, and often when it's over, it is as if a tornado passed. It's a very expensive form of recreation, a theatre play with daydreams, a frolic of your own in which you are the main event. Human love is based in every day, not fantasies or illusions. It acknowledges the other person as a separate person and even loves them for their imperfections, for their vulnerabilities and their incompleteness, and allows them to change and to grow. It seeks to honour, not to use, to empower, not to overpower, and when it fails, it just gets cranky, it does not blow a fuse.”

“Romantic love, I think, requires a degree of physical attraction, but devotion is needed to maintain it as an actual relationship. Physical attraction is a feeling you don't really have control over, but devotion is something that has to be chosen. So, ideally... I suppose it's passion combined with the commitment to value someone else completely above oneself.”

“Romantic love is a fairly recent social behavior. Over the course of human history, this approach accounts for very little of humanity’s time here. Yet, in the unconscious and in fairy tales the mythology of love says we can find the perfect mate, someone who unconditionally loves your smells, has a magical connection to you, will live forever, and will raise a family with you. This is part of the relationship neuroses of the modern world. It is based on people not understanding what love is.”

“Romantic love is blind to everything except what is lovable and lovely, but Christ's love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole. Christ's love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy. The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering which Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.”

“Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw. The second you meet someone that you're going to fall in love with you deliberately become a moron. You do this in order to fall in love, because it would be impossible to fall in love with any human being if you actually saw them for what they are.”

“Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation.... The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.”