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.
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
The ability to be alone is the ability to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. It is an existential truth: only those who can be alone are able to love, to share, to go into the deepest core of another human being—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.
