The Art of Loving

He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who can do nothing understands nothing. He who understands nothing is worthless. But he who understands also loves, notices, sees …. The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love …. Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing about grapes. Paracelsus

What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally.

Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.

The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial experience of “falling” in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of “standing” in love.

The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement.

The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.

The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice.

There is certainty only about the past—and about the future only as far as that it is death.

Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself he has awareness of himself, of his fellow man, of his past, and of the possibilities of his future. This awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison.

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

(there is no good and evil unless there is freedom to disobey),

The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love—is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.

The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.