Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love.
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called “equality.”
Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.
Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”
If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?
