June Callwood: Hate is the underlying emotion of most men. In greater or lesser quantities, people hate all their lives.
Blaise Pascal: Who can doubt that we exist only to love? Disguise it, in fact, as we will, we love without intermission.
Callwood goes on to write, in chapter two of Love, Hate, Fear, Anger and the Other Lively Emotions, that “Without hate, humans would languish all their lives in a warm stupor of passive contentment; without hate, they would need no companion but mother, since mother would be perfect.” This reads like the exact inverse of the role played by love in the Divine Comedy.