Love Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler is trying to rescue eros from its own bad PR, but he does it with a philosopher's scalpel: erotic love counts as love only when it stops acting like appetite. The phrasing is deliberately corrective. He concedes the reality of sexual desire, then sets a moral boundary around it, insisting that what makes it "truly" love is not intensity but orientation. The target isn't sex; it's the narrowing of another person into a means of gratification.

The subtext is classic Adler: love is a kind of willing, not a kind of wanting. In his Aristotelian-Thomistic inheritance, the self doesn't get to be the final reference point. "Selfishly sexual" names a posture where the other is interchangeable, a prop in your private theater. "Lustful" is less a condemnation of pleasure than a critique of consumption. Sexual desire is fine; the ethical failure is when desire becomes the whole story, and the beloved disappears inside the performance of your needs.

Context matters here. Adler spent his career popularizing "great books" moral reasoning in a 20th-century culture increasingly divided between prudish repression and commodified liberation. His line reads like a rebuke to both: against puritanism, he grants erotic love a place in the category of love; against permissiveness-as-consumerism, he demands it be disciplined by regard, commitment, and the good of the other.

What makes the sentence work is its uncomfortable narrowing: it refuses the modern dodge that calling something "love" automatically sanctifies it. For Adler, eros becomes love when it grows a conscience.