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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.
Erich Fromm
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Mature love is based on selflessness and giving, while immature love is dependent and self-serving.

In this quote, Erich Fromm emphasizes the distinction between immature and mature love. Immature love is characterized by a need for validation and affection, focusing on personal gain; whereas mature love is about giving and mutual respect, where individuals love not out of need but out of genuine care and understanding for one another.

Themes

LoveMaturityRelationshipsSelflessnessNeed

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a wedding speech to emphasize the importance of mature love in a partnership.

More from Erich Fromm

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.
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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.
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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 – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.
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In times of change, learners inherit the earth
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In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
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Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.
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