Quote #36

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.

More from Erich Fromm

  1. What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
  2. Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'
  3. In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation. The danger of the past was that men be…
  4. In spite of the universalistic spirit of the monotheistic Western religions and of the progressive political concepts that are expressed in…
  5. In spite of increasing production and comfort, man loses more and more the sense of self, feels that his life is meaningless, even though s…
  6. 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.
  7. In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourag…
  8. The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of …

All Erich Fromm quotes