Erich Fromm

Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.

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.

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.

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.

Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.