Max Scheler - Love Quotes

5 Sourced Quotes

View all Max Scheler Quotes
The fake love of ressentiment man offers no real help, since for his perverted sense of values, evils like sickness and poverty have become goods.

Max Scheler
Antiquity believed that the forces of love in the universe were limited. Therefore they were to be used sparingly, and everyone was to be loved only according to his value.

Max Scheler
The precepts Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you … are born from the Gospel's profound spirit of individualism, which refuses to let one's own actions and conduct depend in any way on somebody else's acts. The Christian refuses to let his acts be mere reactions—such conduct would lower him to the level of his enemy. The act is to grow organically from the person, as the fruit from the tree. … What the Gospel demands is not a reaction which is the reverse of the natural reaction, as if it said: Because he strikes you on the cheek, tend the other —but a rejection of all reactive activity, of any participation in common and average ways of acting and standards of judgment.

Max Scheler
It is precisely the essential feature of egoism that it does not apprehend the full value of the isolated self. The egoist sees himself only with regard to the others, as a member of society who wishes to possess and acquire more than the others. Self-directedness or other-directedness have no essential bearing on the specific quality of love or hatred. These acts are different in themselves, quite independently of their direction

Max Scheler
In the ancient notion of love, on the other hand, there is an element of anxiety. The noble fears the descent to the less noble, is afraid of being infected and pulled down. The sage of antiquity does not have the same firmness, the same inner certainty of himself and his own value, as the genius and hero of Christian love.

Max Scheler