The Art of Listening, Erich Fromm

1. The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
2. Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
3. He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
4. He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
5. The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
6. Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.

Erich Fromm,The Sane Society, quotes

Erich Fromm,The Sane Society

Fromm writes:

"In the realm of feeling, the productive orientation is expressed in love, which is the experience of union with another person, with all men, and with nature, under the condition of retaining one’s sense of integrity and independence. In the experience of love the paradox happens that two people become one, and remain two at the same time. Love in this sense is never restricted to one person. If I can love only one person, and nobody else, if my love for one person makes me more alienated and distant from my fellow man, I may be attached to this person in any number of ways, yet I do not love."

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"If I can say, “I love you,” I say, “I love in you all of humanity, all that is alive; I love in you also myself.” 

Self-love, in this sense, is the opposite of selfishness. "

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"Productive love always implies a syndrome of attitudes; that of care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.

If I love, I care — that is, I am actively concerned with the other person’s growth and happiness; I am not a spectator.

I am responsible, that is, I respond to his needs, to those he can express and more so to those he cannot or does not express.

I respect him, that is (according to the original meaning of re-spicere) I look at him as he is, objectively and not distorted by my wishes and fears.

I know him, I have penetrated through his surface to the core of his being and related myself to him from my core, from the center, as against the periphery, of my being."

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."