If we could present an attainable ideal of love it would resemble the relationship described by Maslow as existing between self-realizing personaliti… - Germaine Greer

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If we could present an attainable ideal of love it would resemble
the relationship described by Maslow as existing between self-realizing
personalities. It is probably a fairly perilous equilibrium: certainly
the forces of order and civilization react fairly directly to
limit the possibilities of self-realization. Maslow describes his ideal
personalities as having a better perception of reality — what Herbert
Read called an innocent eye, like the eye of the child who does not
seek to reject reality. Their relationship to the world of phenomena
is not governed by their personal necessity to exploit it or be exploited
by it, but a desire to observe it and to understand it. They
have no disgust; the unknown does not frighten them. They are
without defensiveness or affectation. The only causes of regret are
laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy and
envy. Their behaviour is spontaneous but it corresponds to an
autonomous moral code. Their thinking is problem-centred, not egocentred
and therefore they most often have a sense of commitment
to a cause beyond their daily concerns. Their responses are geared
to the present

English
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About Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939) is an Australian author, academic, critic and journalist.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Rose Blight Dr. G Terf

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Additional quotes by Germaine Greer

Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.

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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. ‘We were not made to idolize one another, yet the whole
strain of courtship is little more than rank idolatry.’ It may seem
that young men no longer court with the elaborate servilities that
Mary Astell, the seventeenth-century feminist, was talking about,
but the mystic madness of love provides the same spurious halo,
and builds up the same expectations which dissipate as soon as the
new wife becomes capable of ‘calmly considering her Condition

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