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Not to fear a person with power--to profess, instead, one's love--is to deny that that person has power.

Alexander Lowen

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Alexander Lowen
Age: 97 †
Born: 1910
Born: December 23
Died: 2008
Died: October 28
Psychotherapist
New York City
New York
Deny
Instead
Fear
Power
Persons
Person
Love
Profess

More quotes by Alexander Lowen

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Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it.
Alexander Lowen
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We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water. By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere. If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist. In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss.
Alexander Lowen
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Mature love is not a surrender of the self but a surrender to the self. The ego surrenders its hegemony of the personality to the heart, but in this surrender it is not annihilated. Rather it is strengthened because its roots in the body are nourished by the joy that the body feels.
Alexander Lowen
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The single factor most responsible for the disruption of the family is the automobile. Its full effect cannot be assessed. Modern life, as we know, would be impossible without the ubiquitous motorcar. It broke up the old family and community.
Alexander Lowen
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Power seems to confer on its possessor a mantle of superiority, specialness, and sexual potency, which the envious person desperately wants because he feels himself on some level to be inferior, unimportant, and impotent.
Alexander Lowen
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Bioenergetics is an adventure in self-discovery. It differs from similar explorations into the nature of the self by attempting to understand the human personality in terms of the human body. Most previous explorations focused their investigations on the mind.
Alexander Lowen
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A person who doesn't breathe deeply reduces the life of his body. If he doesn't move freely, he restricts the life of his body. If he doesn't feel fully, he narrows the life of his body. And if his self-expression is constricted, he limits the life of his body.
Alexander Lowen
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If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.
Alexander Lowen
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Sexuality is not a leisure or part-time activity. It is a way of being.
Alexander Lowen
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Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.
Alexander Lowen
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Everyone who becomes a psychotherapist eventually adopts a theory that suits his needs.
Alexander Lowen
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Fear is another emotion that is strongly suppressed. We cannot afford to be afraid, and so we don't allow ourselves to sense and feel the fear within us. We lower our brows to deny it, set our jaws to defy it, and smile to deceive ourselves. But inwardly we remain scared to death.
Alexander Lowen
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Despair is the only cure for illusion.
Alexander Lowen
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Sustenance for the infant and child is more than alimentary nourishment. The child needs love, security, narcissistic supplies -- however one may describe it.
Alexander Lowen
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The path to joy leads through despair.
Alexander Lowen
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No one is exempt from the rule that learning occurs through recognition of error.
Alexander Lowen
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The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person. He belongs rightly to the action generation whose motto is do more but feel less.
Alexander Lowen
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In my opinion the hectic and almost frantic pace of modern living is a clear sign of the fear we have of being and of life. And as long as this fear exists in a person's unconscious, he will run faster and do more so as not to feel his fear.
Alexander Lowen
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Love is the feeling that emanates from the heart and extends through the blood to every cell of the body.
Alexander Lowen
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Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.
Alexander Lowen