Eros Quotes

“They'll say you are bad
or perhaps you are mad
or at least you
should stay undercover.
Your mind must be bare
if you would dare
to think you can love
more than one lover.”
― David Rovics

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Is this guy Love or Death?" Jason growled.

Ask your friends, Cupid said. Frank, Hazel, and Percy met my counterpart, Thanatos. We are not so different. Except Death is sometimes kinder.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“Images flashed through his mind. He saw Nico and his sister on a snowy cliff in Maine, Percy Jackson protecting them from a manticore. Percy's sword gleamed in the dark. He'd been the first demigod Nico had ever seen in action.

Later, at Camp Half-Blood, Percy took Nico by the arm, promising to keep his sister Bianca safe. Nico believed him. Nico looked into his sea-green eyes and thought, How can he possibly fail? This is a real hero. He was Nico's favorite game, Mythomagic, brought to life.

Jason saw the moment when Percy returned and told Nico that Bianca was dead. Nico had screamed and called him a liar. He'd felt betrayed, but still... when the skeleton warriors attacked, he couldn't let them harm Percy. Nico had called on the earth to swallow them up, and then he'd run away- terrified of his own powers, and his own emotions.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Love is on every side, Cupid said. And no one's side. Don't ask what Love can do for you.

"Great," Jason said. "Now he's spouting greeting card messages.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church - read on - and give his life for her (Eph. V, 25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is - in her own mere nature - least lovable. For the Church has not beauty but what the Bride-groom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man's marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Nico's voice was like broken glass. "I- I wasn't in love with Annabeth."

"You were jealous of her," Jason said. "That's why you didn't want to be around her. Especially why you don't want to be around... him. It makes total sense.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“Still hiding, Cupid said, smashing another skeleton to pieces. You do not have the strength.

"Nico," Jason managed to say, "it's okay. I get it."

Nico glanced over, pain and misery washing across his face.

"No you don't," he said. "There's no way you can understand."

And so you run away again, Cupid chided. From your friends, from yourself.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“Nico, you can do this," Jason said. "It might be embarrassing, but it's for the scepter."

Nico didn't look convinced. In fact he looked like he was going to be sick. But he squared his shoulders and nodded. "You're right. I- I'm not afraid of a love god."

Favonius beamed. "Excellent! Would you like a snack before you go?”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“Eros, again now, the loosener of limbs troubles me,

Bittersweet, sly, uncontrollable creature….”
― Sappho

“Nothing?" Favonius cried. "The one you care for most... plunged into Tartarus, and you still will not allow the truth?"

Suddenly Jason felt like he was eavedropping.

The one you care for most.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“The story of Psyche finally made sense to him- why a mortal girl would be so afraid. Why would she risk breaking the rules to look the god of love in the face, because she feared he might be a monster.

Psyche had been right. Cupid was a monster. Love was the most savage monster of all.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Please tell me your master isn't Aeolus."

"That airhead?" Favonius snorted. "No, of course not."

"He means Eros." Nico's voice turned edgy. "Cupid, in Latin."

Favonius smiled. "Very good, Nico di Angelo. I'm glad to see you again, by the way. It's been a long time.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“Oh, he's not like that," said Favonius.

Jason flinched. "You can read my mind?"

"I don't need to." Favonius tossed his bronze hoop in the air. "Everyone has the wrong impression of Cupid... until they meet him.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“Gods, I wish the world was full of passive women.He thought for a moment longer, then scowled. On second thoughts, what a nightmare that'd be. It's the job of a man to fan the spark into flames, not quench it...”
― Steven Erikson, Memories of Ice

“So now I get the scepter?" Jason asked.

Cupid laughed. Unfortunately, you could not wield it. Only a child of the Underworld can summon the dead legions. And only an officer of Rome can lead them.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“I think Eros should be dirty. In Greek legend, as I'm sure you are aware, he fell in love with the minor deity Psyche. It was the Greek way of saying that, in spite of what it may believe, Love pursues the Soul, not the body; the Erotic desires the Psychic. If Love was clean and wholesome he wouldn't lust after Psyche.”
― Stephen Fry, The Liar

“As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“We rehearse for the big death through the little death of orgasm, through erotic living. Death as transfiguration”
― Peter Redgrove

“Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“With good reason, love's messengers, Eros and Kama, are armed with bows and long-distance arrows. No being, god or mortal, can choose love. Love comes despite ourselves; and then, if we have not already done so, we have the task of becoming our selves so we may welcome love.”
― Diane Wolkstein, The First Love Stories: From Isis and Osiris to Tristan and Iseult

“I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form? Do you think it would be a poor life for a human being to look there and to behold it by that which he ought, and to be with it? Or haven't you remembered that in that life alone, when he looks at Beauty in the only way what Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth no to images of virtue but to true virtue. The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“In conclusion, it is appropriate to say something about the destiny of the face, in the world that we have entered – a world in which eros is being rapidly detached from inter-personal commitments and redesigned as a commodity. The first victim of this process is the face, which has to be subdued to the rule of the body, to be shown as overcome, wiped out or spat upon. The underlying tendency of erotic images in our time is to present the body as the focus and meaning of desire, the place where it all occurs, in the momentary spasm of sensual pleasure of which the soul is at best a spectator, and no part of the game. In pornography the face has no role to play, other than to be subjected to the empire of the body. Kisses are of no significance, and eyes look nowhere since they are searching for nothing beyond the present pleasure. All this amounts to a marginalization, indeed a kind of desecration, of the human face. And this desecration of the face is also a cancelling out of the subject. Sex, in the pornographic culture, is not a relation between subjects but a relation between objects. And anything that might enter to impede that conception of the sexual act – the face in particular – must be veiled, marred or spat upon, as an unwelcome intrusion of judgement into a sphere where everything goes. All this is anticipated in the pornographic novel, Histoire d’O, in which enslaved and imprisoned women are instructed to ignore the identity of the men who enjoy them, to submit their faces to the penis, and to be defaced by it.

A parallel development can be witnessed in the world of sex idols. Fashion models and pop stars tend to display faces that are withdrawn, scowling and closed. Little or nothing is given through their faces, which offer no invitation to love or companionship. The function of the fashion-model’s face is to put the body on display; the face is simply one of the body’s attractions, with no special role to play as a focus of another’s interest. It is characterized by an almost metaphysical vacancy, as though there is no soul inside, but only, as Henry James once wrote, a dead kitten and a ball of string. How we have arrived at this point is a deep question that I must here pass over. But one thing is certain, which is that things were not always so. Sex symbols and sex idols have always existed. But seldom before have they been faceless.

One of the most famous of those symbols, Simonetta Vespucci, mistress of Lorenzo da Medici, so captured the heart of Botticelli that he used her as the model for his great painting of the Birth of Venus. In the central figure the body has no meaning other than the diffusion and outgrowth of the soul that dreams in the face – anatomically it is wholly deformed, and a girl who actually looked like this would have no chance in a modern fashion parade. Botticelli is presenting us with the true, Platonic eros, as he saw it – the face that shines with a light that is not of this world, and which invites us to transcend our appetites and to aspire to that higher realm where we are united to the forms – Plato’s version of a world in which the only individuals are souls. Hence the body of Botticelli’s Venus is subservient to the face, a kind of caricature of the female anatomy which nevertheless takes its meaning from the holy invitation that we read in the eyes above.”
― Roger Scruton, Face of God: The Gifford Lectures

“Psych is a mortal whom the god Eros falls in love with. She is given ambrosia on Mount Olympus and weds Eros as a god.”

“I’ll be up for tenure in a few years. Does that count?”
― Anton Hur, Toward Eternity

“Eros remains largely egocentric...it is a longing for union with an object which will fulfil the promise of self-completion....[Agape] is theocentric and selfless. It can flow through us, but it is not 'ours.' We only love, according to 1 John 4.19 'because he first loved us.”
― Andrew Vincent, Nationalism and Particularity

“Preferential love seeks only those who share one's passions--the more similar the lovers the more fervent the love. By contrast, neighbour love is not preferential and there is no question of loving for sameness' sake. It thrives in a situation of difference, able to include many people under its aegis. The drift of love based on passionate preference is always towards 'the one.' The drift of neighbour love is always towards 'the many.”
― Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard's Critique of Christian Nationalism