QuoteProject
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.
Erich Fromm
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Mature love is based on selflessness and giving, while immature love is dependent and self-serving.

In this quote, Erich Fromm emphasizes the distinction between immature and mature love. Immature love is characterized by a need for validation and affection, focusing on personal gain; whereas mature love is about giving and mutual respect, where individuals love not out of need but out of genuine care and understanding for one another.

Themes

LoveMaturityRelationshipsSelflessnessNeed

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a wedding speech to emphasize the importance of mature love in a partnership.

More from Erich Fromm

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 only one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves.
Erich FrommRead
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Erich FrommRead
To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.
Erich FrommRead
In times of change, learners inherit the earth
Erich FrommRead
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
Erich FrommRead
Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.
Erich FrommRead

Similar quotes

You're not sick you're just in love.
Irving BerlinRead
But you make me sing like a guitar humming . . .
Neil DiamondRead
Venus, ancient goddess of love and beauty, is an apparently irrelevant, invented deity of the long dead. But Venus merits scrutiny. Chart her life story across 5,000 years and you chart the evolution of our conflicted relationship with sex and with the female body.
Bettany HughesRead
Gay and lesbian people want to love and be loved. Some of us want to get married. Some want to have and build families. We want our kids to have their lives be a little bit better than what we've had.
Dustin Lance BlackRead
Compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth that is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings - an awareness of the tragic sense of life.
Sam KeenRead
There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. And when you do find one, observe with care, they almost always have crystals in their heart
Gabriel Garcia MarquezRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.