Quotes By Erich Fromm

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

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

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

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

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.

Authority is not a quality one person "has," in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.

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

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.

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.

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.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.