18 quotes
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
The Art of Loving (1956)
Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.
The Art of Loving (1956)
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
The Art of Loving (1956)
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
The Art of Loving (1956)
In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.
The Art of Loving (1956)
Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves.
The Art of Loving (1956)
To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.
The Art of Loving (1956)
All men are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual.
The Art of Loving (1956)
Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings.
The Art of Loving (1956)
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
The Art of Loving (1956)
In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child’s separation.
The Art of Loving (1956)
The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious.
The Art of Loving (1956)
Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion.
The Art of Loving (1956)
To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow.
The Art of Loving (1956)
Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.
The Art of Loving (1956)
In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God’s existence, God’s justice, God’s love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.
The Art of Loving (1956)
The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.
The Art of Loving (1956)
The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a "loving” mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.
The Art of Loving (1956)