Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Love is not a spontaneous feeling, a thing that you fall into, but is something that requires thought, knowledge, care, giving, and respect. And it is something that is rare and difficult to find in capitalism, which commodifies human activity.
Interpretation
Love is a skill that requires knowledge, effort, and respect, rather than just a spontaneous feeling.
In this quote, Erich Fromm emphasizes that love should not be viewed as an effortless, spontaneous emotion, but rather as an art that requires dedication, understanding, and respect. He critiques the way capitalism commodifies relationships and emotions, highlighting that true love is a rare and valuable endeavor that demands continuous effort and mindfulness.
In practice
During a relationship workshop, to explain the importance of nurturing love.
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 – 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.
I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days!
Alas! never had I loved him so well!
And now good morrow to our waking souls, Which watch not one another out of fear; For love, all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room, an everywhere. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown, Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
There is no love; there are only proofs of love. Whatever love I might feel in my heart, others will see only my action.
And when no hope was left inside on that starry, starry night, you took your life as lovers often do. But I could have told you, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.
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