Top 50 Alexander Lowen Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Change is possible, but it must start with self-acceptance.”

— Alexander Lowen

2. “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

3. “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

4. “No one is exempt from the rule that learning occurs through recognition of error.”

— Alexander Lowen

5. “Sexuality is not a leisure or part-time activity. It is a way of being.”

— Alexander Lowen

6. “Death is the fate no one can escape. The question, then, is, How does one die? A person can die like a hero or like a coward. The difference is that the hero can face death without fear, whereas the coward can’t.”

— Alexander Lowen

7. “Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.”

— Alexander Lowen

8. “It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.”

— Alexander Lowen

9. “A person does not choose his or her fate; he or she only fulfills it. We are bound by our fate as long as we accept the values that determine it.”

— Alexander Lowen

10. “Despair is the only cure for illusion.”

— Alexander Lowen

11. “Love is the feeling that emanates from the heart and extends through the blood to every cell of the body.”

— Alexander Lowen

12. “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

13. “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

14. “A tree grows taller to the degree that its roots go deeper and wider. If we wish to jump high, we must first bend close to the ground to get the impetus for the spring. Like a jet engine, we move forward by thrusting backward. In therapy each backward move provides the energy for the leap forward. Regression and progression go on side by side.”

— Alexander Lowen

15. “The living organism expresses itself in movement more clearly than in words. But not alone in movement! In pose, in posture, in attitude and in every gesture, the organism speaks a language which antedates and transcends its verbal expression.”

— Alexander Lowen

16. “Crying is the most primitive mechanism the body has to relieve tension and pain.”

— Alexander Lowen

17. “Few people in our culture have the courage to be themselves. Most people adopt roles, play games, wear masks, or put up facades.”

— Alexander Lowen

18. “Once we give up our true self to play a role, we are fated to be rejected because we have already rejected ourselves. Yet we will struggle to make the role more successful, hoping to overcome our fate but finding ourselves more enmeshed in it. We are caught in a vicious cycle that keeps closing in, diminishing our life and being.”

— Alexander Lowen

19. “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

20. “I would describe a hero as a person who has no fear of life, who can face life squarely.”

— Alexander Lowen

21. “The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid.”

— Alexander Lowen

22. “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

23. “Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity in doubt.”

— Alexander Lowen

24. “Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority.”

— Alexander Lowen

25. “The ego exists as a powerful force in Western man that cannot be dismissed or denied. The therapeutic goal is to integrate the ego with the body and its striving for pleasure and sexual fulfilment.”

— Alexander Lowen

26. “Above all, faith is grounded in one’s body, in one’s humanity, and in one’s animal nature. It is an biological phenomenon and not a psychic creation.”

— Alexander Lowen

27. “The only way you can make a marriage work is as free, independent people. It needs to be based on the good feelings that you have for each other, not on need.”

— Alexander Lowen

28. “The feeling of love is a rich feeling, but the expression of love in word or deed is a joy.”

— Alexander Lowen

29. “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

30. “If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.”

— Alexander Lowen

31. “And we need to know what it is to be human, if we are to avoid becoming narcissists.”

— Alexander Lowen

32. “When wealth occupies a higher position than wisdom, when notoriety is admired more than dignity, when success is more important than self-respect, the culture itself overvalues “image” and must be regarded as narcissistic.”

— Alexander Lowen

33. “To sell out the kingdom of heaven for power is a devil’s bargain. It is the bargain that the narcissist makes.”

— Alexander Lowen

34. “Every chronic muscular tension in the body has associated with it sadness, fear, and anger. Since tension is a restriction of our being, it makes us sad. It also makes us angry to be so limited. And we are frightened to show our sadness or express our anger, so we stay locked in a diminished state of being and tied to our fate.”

— Alexander Lowen

35. “Life is not a mixture of matter and energy but energy in matter, bound in such a way that dissociation is impossible so long as the living process continues.”

— Alexander Lowen

36. “Narcissists are neither carefree nor innocent. They have learned to play the power game, to seduce and to manipulate. They are always thinking about how people see and respond to them. And they must stay in control because loss of control evokes their fear of insanity.”

— Alexander Lowen

37. “Therapy takes us backward into a forgotten past, but this was not a safe and secure time, else we would not have emerged from it scarred by battle wounds and armoured in self-defense.”

— Alexander Lowen

38. “The more progress we make up the economic ladder the less freedom we have and without freedom, there is no joy. We can be fulfilled as human beings only when our lives are rooted in our bodies, our animal nature and the earth. Unfortunately, our technological culture cuts us off more and more from these fundamental connections.”

— Alexander Lowen

39. “What happened to me is that as I grew up, I found that I was smart. My mother had insisted on that you see. Oh, but I loved to play ball. I loved the physical aspect. So you have one leg in one field, and one leg in the other and you’re nowhere.”

— Alexander Lowen

40. “The path to joy leads through despair.”

— Alexander Lowen

41. “The ability to contain excitation or feeling is self-possession. It is the third stage in the therapeutic program. The first two are self-awareness and self-expression. Self-possession is the stage in which the ego functions as the standard-bearer of a self that knows who it is and what it has to do. The self possesses an ego. It is the stage in which the self experiences its being as a fully mature man or woman.”

— Alexander Lowen

42. “Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it.”

— Alexander Lowen

43. “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

44. “How much easier and more pleasurable life can be when one doesn’t have to make a decision because one’s desire is so clear and strong that it leaves one with no choice in behavior.”

— Alexander Lowen

45. “One of the ways in which our culture fosters the narcissistic personality is by its exaggerated emphasis upon the importance of winning. There is a popular slogan that says winning is the only thing that counts. Such an attitude minimizes human values and subordinates the feelings of others to this one overriding goal to win, to be on top, to be number one. But.”

— Alexander Lowen

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Not to fear a person with power – to profess, instead, one’s love – is to deny that that person has power.”

— Alexander Lowen

49. “Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.”

— Alexander Lowen

50. “Everyone who becomes a psychotherapist eventually adopts a theory that suits his needs.”

— Alexander Lowen