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The Art of Loving Summary
About The Art of Loving Book
The landmark bestseller that changed the way we think about love: “Every line is packed with common sense, compassion, and realism” (Fortune).
The Art of Loving is a rich and detailed guide to love—an achievement reached through maturity, practice, concentration, and courage. In the decades since the book’s release, its words and lessons continue to resonate. Erich Fromm, a celebrated psychoanalyst and social psychologist, clearly and sincerely encourages the development of our capacity for and understanding of love in all of its facets. He discusses the familiar yet misunderstood romantic love, the all-encompassing brotherly love, spiritual love, and many more.
A challenge to traditional Western notions of love, The Art of Loving is a modern classic about taking care of ourselves through relationships with others by the New York Times–bestselling author of To Have or To Be? and Escape from Freedom.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erich Fromm including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.
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4.7/5 (2003 reviews)
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This book wants to show that love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone, regardless of the level of maturity reached by him.
Is Love an Art?
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.
98
Being Loved and Loving
Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.
104
Object and Faculty
A premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty.
91
What we think love is
Most of us think that love is passive, that you can be loved and that you fall in love. Not that love is actually a form of art.
This is the reason why most people think that being loved depends of our popularity and our sex-appeal.
43
Love as an object
Commonly we think love is easy while finding an object to love is difficult. The cause for this lays in our belief that romantic love just happens spontaneously.
Besides of that we often see attractive people as a gain if we manage to get together with them.
People look for the best partner within their own possibilities on the market.
42
Falling in love
There's a difference between falling in love and loving.
People often fall in love for each other and become crazy for the partner. It starts with a big curiosity and attraction. At a certain point, when we know each other well enough and for a while, the intimacy starts getting less and ends in boredom. In reality their inicial crazyiness for each other was only an indicator for their loneliness before they met.
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Erich Fromm's Musings on Love.
Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.
ERICH FROMM
39
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 stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.
ERICH FROMM
33
...in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving. Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which "only" profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend energy on?
ERICH FROMM
26
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