A Quote by Germaine Greer

Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures.

Germaine Greer

Quote Topics

Cant Egotism Fantasy Love Lust Masochism Mythology Sentimental Wretched

Quote Author

Germaine Greer
Australian - Activist
Born: January 29, 1939

Love, love, love – all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.

Germaine Greer

Egotism erects its center in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the following moment, or with the view to a martyr's crown--indifferent whether the reward is in this life or in the next.

Friedrich Schiller

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, But Lust's effect is tempest after sun; Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain, Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done; Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies; Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.

William Shakespeare

There's a difference between lust and passionate love. Lust can't just creep in. You'll not find it where true love exists, but it has power enough to shatter the world you've worked so hard to create with love, and sometimes, it suddenly changes how you perceived love to begin with. Love then doesn't live there anymore.

Jennifer Winget

Love is not lust. The two (love and lust) are poles apart. Love liberates while lust binds.

Narayanananda Swami.

A lot of time we build on lust that becomes very strong. Yet, when that lust wears off we think that love is running out, but really it's the lust that had an expiration date. We have to know what real love is and if we're really in-love.

Tony Gaskins

August Wilhelm von Schlegel

Love, which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb. Love, which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom. Love, which is lust, is the Main of Desire. Love, which is lust, is the Centric Fire. So man and woman will keep their trust, Till the very Springs of the Sea run dust. Yea, each with the other will lose and win, Till the very Sides of the Grave fall in. For the strife of Love's the abysmal strife, And the word of Love is the Word of Life. And they that go with the Word unsaid, Though they seem of the living, are damned and dead.

William Ernest Henley

You must know that I do not love and that I love you, because everything alive has its two sides; a word is one wing of silence, fire has its cold half. I love you in order to begin to love you, to start infinity again and never to stop loving you: that’s why I do not love you yet. I love you, and I do not love you, as if I held keys in my hand: to a future of joy- a wretched, muddled fate- My love has two lives, in order to love you. -Sonnet XLIV

Pablo Neruda

Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share.

Andrei Codrescu

This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.

David Mitchell

There can be no sexual love without lust; but, on the other hand, until the currents of lust in the organism have been irradiatedas to affect other parts of the psychic organism--at the least the affections and the social feelings--it is not yet sexual love. Lust, the specific sexual impulse, is indeed the primary and essential element in this synthesis, for it alone is adequate to the end of reproduction, not only in animals but in men. But it is not until lust is expanded and irradiated that it develops into the exquisite and enthralling flower of love.

Havelock Ellis

When sex becomes conscious it is love, it is no longer lust. Love brings freedom, and lust simply creates prisons for you.

Rajneesh

It is the Spirit that sheds the love of God abroad in their hearts, and the love of all mankind; thereby purifying their hearts from the love of the world, from the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life. It is by Him they are delivered from anger and pride, from all vile and inordinate affections.