Quotes By Erich Fromm

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.

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 always dies before he is fully born.

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.

Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

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.

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.

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.

We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

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.