The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm, quotes

"The first step to taake is to become aware that love is an art..."

"Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself; he has awareness of himself, of his fellow men, of his past, and of the possibilities of his future."

(on Adam and Eve) "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 n of his aloneness:"

"This desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful striving in man. "

"Yet if we call he achievement of interpersonal union "love", we find ourselves in serious difficulty. "

"What matters is that we know what kind of union we are talking about when we speak of love.
Do we speak about love as the mature answer to the problem of existence, or..."

"In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under the condition of preserving one's integrity, one's individuality. Love is an active power in man ; a power which breaks through the walls  which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two."

"Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That i love from the essence of my being-and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being."

"...,the main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's own narcissism."

"The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is humility."

"The ability to love......depends on our capacity to grow, to develop a productive orientation in or relationship toward the world and ourselves. The process of emergence, of birth, of waking up, requires one quality as a necessary condition: faith. "

he ends:

"To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence.
To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man."

another part of this book deals with "Love of God" :

""Thought can only lead us to the knowledge that it cannot give us the ultimate answer. The world of thought remains caught in the paradox. The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies , not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness. Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one's love for God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God.
 This leads to the emphasis on the right way of living. All of life, every little and every important action, is devoted to the knowledge of God, but a knowledge not in right thought, but in right action."

..

"In short, paradoxical thought led to tolerance and an effort toward self-transformation.
The Aristotelean standpoint led to dogma and science, to the Catholic Church, and to the discovery of atomic energy."