Quote collection
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"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. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a "standing in," not a "falling for." In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving."
"Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life."
"Happiness is a man's greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside."
"Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?..Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission?"
"Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life."
"Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life"
"I would say that love today is a relatively rare phenomenon, that we have a great deal of sentimentality; we have a great deal of illusion about love, namely as a... as something one falls in."
"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."
"In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation."
"Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments."
"I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice."
"Beyond the element of giving, the active characteristic of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsability, respect and knowledge"
"If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself, too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all."
"Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world."
"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."
"The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person and him of great joy is the difference between get and give."
"I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way."
"The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist."
"Man unites himself with the world in the process of creation."
"If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others."