Art Of Loving Quotes

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.

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

In the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.

Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.

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 creates the unity which has unlimited spiritual strength, and that is the greatest need in the world today, and each and every one of us can make such a difference if we become humble, if we develop a service attitude rather than an exploitative attitude, if we develop the broad mind to see the oneness and to learn to love all living beings.

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

Equality today means ‘sameness’, rather than ‘oneness’.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.

If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man.

Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.

The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other. The difference is only that the sadistic person commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense; in a deeper emotional sense, the difference is not so great as that which they both have in common: fusion without integrity .

Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.p97.

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.

Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unite him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity.

Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.

Society must be organized in such a way that mans social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.

Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.

The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge.

It is only when you have mastered the art of loving yourself that you can truly love others. it's only when you have opened your own heart that you can touch the hearts of others. when you feel centered and alive, you are in much better position to be a better person.

Giving is the highest expression of potency.

People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love - or to be loved by - is difficult.

Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict; joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are only one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves.

...in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving. Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which "only" profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend energy on?

Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love

Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

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

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'