If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

Erich Fromm
Some Similar Quotes
  1. One of the basic Sufi needs is to enable people to see themselves as they really are. - Idries Shah

  2. The Sufis regard systems which treat everyone alike as mechanical and degenerate. - Idries Shah

  3. All literature, or most literature, is about sex." (A. Burgess) - Blanche Bachelar

  4. Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased. - Philip Rieff

  5. No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own .. . and that the trouble... - Robert A. Heinlein

More Quotes By Erich Fromm
  1. Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will...

  2. Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love

  3. 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.

  4. Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from...

  5. If other people do not understand our behavior–so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and...

Related Topics