I leave you the best phrases of The Art of Loving, a 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 the result of a compulsion.
-The deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to abandon the prison of his loneliness.
-The consensus of all 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 separate 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.
-Practically, there is no other activity or company that starts with such tremendous hopes and expectations and that, nevertheless, fails as often as love.
-Actually, what for most people in our culture equates to lovable 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.
-In close relationship with 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 exquisite bliss.
-People capable of loving, in the current system, are by force 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 object 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 her.
-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 one's own capacity to love.
-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, nevertheless, they 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 as we would if we wanted to learn any other art.
-Sex without love only bridges the gap that exists between two human beings momentarily.
-Love is a constant challenge; not a place of rest, but a move, grow, work together; let there be 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 us both, 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.
-Take 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 who has a lot is not rich, but he who gives a lot.
-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, 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 the 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.
-Child 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 basically means being able to listen. Most people listen to others, and still give advice, without actually 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 another day.
-The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the desire to know the secret of things and life.
-Love is not essentially a relationship with a specific person, it is an attitude, a character orientation that determines the type of relationship of a person with the world as a whole, not with a loving object.
-The answers depend, to a certain extent, on the degree of individualization achieved by the individual.