As we approach Valentine’s day, here are some perhaps less familiar quotes about love.
I’m taking part in a panel discussion at Conway Hall, central London, on Weds 18th February – come along to join in the conversation about contemporary love and dating. Tickets from £10 – book here.
Erich Fromm
The Art of Loving
The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to 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.
Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence. Only in this “central experience” is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for 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 one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized.
Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love.
If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, “I love you,” I must be able to say, “I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.”
bell hooks
All about love
The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.
Eckhart Tolle
The Power of Now
To love is to recognize yourself in another.
Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.
Lucy Fry
Love and Choice
What, in your relationships, have you chosen? What would you choose, if you felt able?
Anita Cassidy
Endings and Beginnings – an Eloise and Smith story
We weave together: strands in an enormous tapestry being created by the universe. Who knows when and where our connection will be tied off, what pattern is being made for gods to witness
