The 53 phrases of The art of loving

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Sherman Hoover

I leave you the best quotes of The art of Loving, book written by the famous German Jewish psychologist Erich Fromm. Published in 1956, it makes an analysis of love from a sociological, psychological and philosophical perspective.

You may also be interested in these phrases of great psychologists.

Erich Fromm, author of The Art of Loving. Source: Wikimedia Commons -Müller-May / Rainer Funk

-While we consciously fear not being loved, the real fear, although usually unconscious, is that of loving.

-Envy, jealousy, ambition, all kinds of greed, are passions; love is an action, the practice of a human power that can only be realized in freedom and never as a result of a compulsion.

-The deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his loneliness.

-Everyone's consensus serves as proof of the correctness of their ideas.

-Sexual attraction creates, for a moment, the illusion of union, but without love, such union leaves strangers as far apart as before..

-Care, responsibility, respect and knowledge are mutually interdependent.

-Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the indispensable condition for the ability to love.

-The feeling of falling in love only develops with respect to human goods that are within our possibilities of exchange.

-There is practically no other activity or company that starts with such tremendous hopes and expectations and yet fails as often as love..

-In reality, what amounts to lovable to most people in our culture is, in essence, a mixture of popularity and sex appeal..

-In a non-orgiastic culture, alcohol and drugs are the means at your disposal..

-Love is the active concern for life and the growth of what we love.

-Giving produces more happiness than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving is the expression of my vitality.

-Closely related to the development of the capacity to love is the evolution of the love object.

-There is a big difference between falling in love and staying in love.

-If a person loves only another and is indifferent to the rest of their peers, their love is not love, but a symbiotic relationship or an expanded egoism.

-It is not given in order to receive; giving is in itself an exquisite bliss.

-People capable of loving, in the current system, are necessarily the exception; love is inevitably a fringe phenomenon in contemporary western society.

-If two people who have been strangers suddenly let the wall between them break to feel and discover each other, this will be one of their most exciting experiences..

-Two people fall in love when they feel they have found the best item available on the market.

-The need to relieve tension only partially motivates the attraction between the sexes; the fundamental motivation is the need for union with the other sexual pole.

-I have to know the other person and myself objectively, to be able to see their reality, or rather, to put aside the illusions, my irrationally deformed image of them.

-Good and evil do not exist if there is no freedom to disobey.

-For most people, the problem of love consists fundamentally in being loved, and not in loving, not in the capacity to love itself..

-What is giving? The most common misunderstanding consists in assuming that giving means “giving up” something, depriving oneself of something, sacrificing oneself.

-In love there is the paradox of two beings that become one and yet remain two.

-Love is the active penetration of the other person, in which the union satisfies my desire to know.

-Selfish people are incapable of loving others, but they cannot love themselves either.

-Only the person who has faith in himself can be faithful to others.

-If we want to learn to love, we must proceed in the same way we would if we wanted to learn any other art..

-Sex without love only momentarily bridges the gap between two human beings.

-Love is a constant challenge; not a place of rest, but a move, grow, work together; that there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness.

-Love is an activity, not a passive effect; It is a continuous being, not a sudden start.

-In the act of loving, of surrendering, in the act of penetrating the other person, I find myself, I discover myself, I discover both of us, I discover the man.

-Love is an active power in man; a power that crosses the barriers that separate man from his peers and unites him to others

-Knowing and yet thinking that we do not know is the highest achievement; not knowing, and yet thinking that we know, is a disease.

-In erotic love, two beings that were separated become one. In maternal love, two beings that were united separate.

- If you are not productive in other aspects, you are not productive in love either.

-Is love an art? In such a case, it requires knowledge and effort.

-Taking the difficulties, setbacks and sorrows of life as a challenge whose overcoming makes us stronger.

-In the sphere of material things, giving means being rich. He is not rich who has much, but he who gives much.

-Unconditional love corresponds to one of the deepest longings, not only of the child, but of every human being.

-Maternal love for the growing child, a love that wants nothing for itself, is perhaps the most difficult form of love to achieve, and the most deceptive, because of the ease with which a mother can love her little one..

-In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love means union on condition of preserving one's integrity, one's own individuality..

-Each of our relationships with man and with nature must be a definite expression of our real, individual life, corresponding to the object of our will..

-Another very frequent mistake is the illusion that love necessarily means the absence of conflict..

-Love is a power that produces love; impotence is the inability to produce love.

-Childish love follows the principle: "I love because they love me." Mature love obeys at the beginning: "They love me because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need it." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you".

-Focusing on relationships with others fundamentally means being able to listen. Most people listen to others, and still give advice, without really listening.

-The specific characteristics that make a person attractive, both physically and mentally, depend on the fashion of the time..

-Without love, humanity could not exist one more day.

-Cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the desire to know the secret of things and of life.

-Love is not essentially a relationship with a specific person, it is an attitude, a character orientation that determines a person's type of relationship with the world as a whole, not with a loving object..

-The answers depend, to some extent, on the degree of individualization achieved by the individual.


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