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Erich Fromm
Quotes by Erich Fromm
Quotes by Erich Fromm
“Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'”
Erich Fromm
“Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.”
Erich Fromm
“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”
Erich Fromm
“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.”
Erich Fromm
“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.”
Erich Fromm
“Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.”
Erich Fromm
“The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.”
Erich Fromm
“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
Erich Fromm
“In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”
Erich Fromm
“Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?”
Erich Fromm
“If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?”
Erich Fromm
“Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”
Erich Fromm
“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.”
Erich Fromm
“If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.”
Erich Fromm
“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”
Erich Fromm
“Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.”
Erich Fromm
“To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”
Erich Fromm
“The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.”
Erich Fromm
“There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.”
Erich Fromm
“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.”
Erich Fromm
“In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”
Erich Fromm
“Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.”
Erich Fromm
“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”
Erich Fromm
“Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.”
Erich Fromm
“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.”
Erich Fromm
“We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.”
Erich Fromm
“The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.”
Erich Fromm
“The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.”
Erich Fromm
“What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.”
Erich Fromm
“Man always dies before he is fully born.”
Erich Fromm
