Erich Fromm Quotes

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

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

It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.

Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

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.

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

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

The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.

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

True love is like a pair of socks: you gotta have two and they've gotta match.

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

When people can't handle God any more, they turn to religion.

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

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

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

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.

The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love.

It is time to cease to argue about God , and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry.

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.

People do not see that the main question is not : "Am I loved?" which is to a large extent the question : "Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?" The main question is: "Can I love?

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.

I need you because I love you.

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness

Happiness does not exclude sadness - if a person responds to life, he's sometimes happy and sometimes sad. What matters is he responds.

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

There is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves. And there is nothing which brings us greater joy and happiness than to think, feel, and say what is ours.

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

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.

Giving is the highest expression of potency.

Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.

The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.

The deepest need of the human being is to overcome our separateness, to leave the prison of our loneliness.

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.

Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the same time the beginning of his freedom and the development of his reason.

An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.

If the handbag could think, it would have a terrific inferiority feeling, because, not having been bought, it would feel useless.

Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.

We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.

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

You have to stop in order to change direction.

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

Love is an act of faith.

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

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

There is undoubtedly a difference between people who manipulate other people and people who create things.

We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams... we are also more inteligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake.