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.
Interpretation
Love often begins with high hopes but frequently leads to disappointment.
This quote by Erich Fromm highlights the paradoxical nature of love, where many people embark on the journey of love filled with optimism and aspirations. Despite these high hopes, love often ends in failure or heartache, illustrating the complex and sometimes painful reality of romantic relationships.
In practice
During a discussion about relationships in a workshop, one might say, 'As Erich Fromm wisely noted, love is often accompanied by great hopes but can lead to unexpected failures.'
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.
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.
To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern β and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.
In times of change, learners inherit the earth
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he canβt say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat.
A long time ago, there were lovers that lived on the opposite ends of a river. They promised to meet when the camellia flowers bloomed. But it rained so much the boat couldn't cross the river. So the two couldn't meet, even though the camellia flowers had all bloomed. Lets meet again. Before the camellia flowers wilt.
Whenever we encounter another person in love, we learn something new about God.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
It is love alone that leads to right action. What brings order in the world is to love and let love do what it will.
it was not enough to be the last guy she kissed. i wanted to be the last one she loved.
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