While every human being has a capacity for love, realization is one of the most difficult achievements. Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love. Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others. That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature. The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge. The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent. The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding of his powers. What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal. In love, the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two. | 
