Quotes By Erich Fromm

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

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.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.

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.

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.

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 capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

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

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

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?

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

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

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.

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.