"Thus it is that when a man has been really awakened to the sense of being or existence, and grasps intuitively the obscure, living depth of the self and subjectivity, he experiences, by virtue of the inner dynamism of this intuition, that love is not a passing pleasure or a more or less intense emotion, but the root tendency and very meaning of his being alive. He becomes both an 'ontological' and an 'erotic' man; his man anew."
-- Jacques Maritain, "A New Approach to God" (The Range of Reason, p.92)