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Umberto Galimberti Quotes
born 1942 Italy
Umberto Galimberti (born 1942) is an Italian philosopher, university professor, essayist, and psychoanalyst. He has been a disciple of Emanuele Severino.
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21 quotes
Love fades because nothing remains the same over time.
If the need to reassure one's own intrinsic insecurity generates fidelity, the need not to lose oneself in the other generates betrayal.
From being a centre of symbolic radiation in primitive communities, the body has become in the West the negative of every “value” that knowledge, with the faithful complicity of power, has accumulated.
Perhaps there is nothing behind life as a couple, and this hidden nothingness arouses that infinite curiosity that makes each of us tireless seekers of love, almost always oblivious to the fact that every event of love is always decreed by heaven.
It is easy to say “love”. But only the Devil knows what lies beneath this word.
It is clear that the more technological society becomes, the more jobs are lost. Paradoxically, what has always been man's oldest dream: liberation from work is turning into a nightmare.
This is the ability that today's man has lost, as he is unable [...] to “imagine” the ultimate effects of his “actions”.
The more temporal power is separated from spiritual power, the more correct the relationship between the two is.
And so, by giving nothingness a semantic power that radiates at a distance to mean anything, fashion cheaply solves identity problems that put an end to the agonising question: “Who am I?”.
If old age no longer shows its vulnerability, where can we find the reasons for “pietas”, the need for sincerity, the demand for answers on which social cohesion is based?
Humans have never inhabited the world, but only the description that myths, religion, philosophy and science have given of the world from time to time. (p. 15)
There is only one solution for raising children happily: loving relationships, whether between a heterosexual couple or a homosexual couple. Where there is love, children grow up well; where there is violence or emotional coldness, children grow up badly.
Between the Self and the Self, the conflict is as violent as it is between God and the earth. (p. 20)
In this sense, it is possible to say that science, utopia and revolution are all animated by a deeply religious view of time and history, where what was announced at the beginning is ultimately realised.
Despite what advertising would have us believe, happiness does not come from the latest generation of mobile phones or computers, or more generally from “products”, but from a shred of “extra relationship”.
“The stroke of genius of Christianity”, which exorcises death by guaranteeing immortality to every human being, has become a common belief that even science has failed to undermine; indeed, in a certain sense, it has contributed to definitively rooting this conviction.
Every love story lays bare the nature of our soul, which relies on language to express malice, envy, jealousy, kisses poisoned by hatred, tenderness feigned to the point of seeming real, the awareness of knowing each other's secrets: all links in that heavy chain that twists our soul into plots that only language can weave.
Among the enthusiastic followers of Tissot we find Rousseau and Kant, for whom those who masturbate are not unlike ‘suicides’ who destroy with a single gesture the life that masturbators sacrifice over time. (p. 48)
AIDS, by presenting us with this inextricable intertwining of life and death, and of love and death, reactivates the image of the vampire who, with his cleft lip, piercing canines, scarlet face, sharp tongue and single nostril, gruesomely represents that death which is never in its place and therefore haunts the unconscious of those who live striving to keep it as far away as possible.
Philosophy loves disagreements, because disagreements produce, generate, feed, and create thematic variations, heuristic games, and absolute novelties. (p. 88)
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