Quotes from Denis de Rougemont

Happiness is indeed a Eurydice, vanishing as soon as gazed upon. It can exist only in acceptance, and succumbs as soon as it is laid claim to.

Social confusion has now reached a point at which the pursuit of immorality turns out to be more exhausting than compliance with the old moral codes.

A life allied with mine, for the rest of our lives... that is the miracle of marriage.

Why should neurotic, selfish, immature people suddenly become angels when they fall in love ... ?

Happiness ... can exist only in acceptance.

Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god.

Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.

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.

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.

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.

the knowledge of true danger may cure us of false fears

This peculiar connexion between a certain view of woman and the European conception of war has had profound consequences for morality, education, and politics.

The more a man is given to sentiment ,the more likely is he to be wordy and to speak well.

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.

La décadence d'une société commence quand l'homme se demande: "Que va-t-il arriver?" au lieu de se demander: "Que puis-je faire?

Love ceases to be a demon only when it ceases to be a god.