The Art of Loving Quotes

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

To 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.

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 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.

Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness.

Love is an action, the practice of a human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as the result of a compulsion.

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.

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

The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other.

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

Mother’s love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.