Erich Fromm on envy

Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.’

To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person.

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

Such men as he be never at heart’s ease whiles they behold a greater than themselves, and therefore are they very dangerous.

William Shakespeare1564–1616Julius Caesar (1623), Julius Cæsar (1599), Act I, scene 2, line 208.In context

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.

Josh Billings1818–1885

• Love

I am Envy. I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.

Christopher Marlowe1564–1593