Famous Quotes

Quotes by Erich Fromm

• 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.
• 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.
• Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
• In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
• In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
• Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
• 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.
• Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
• Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
• Man always dies before he is fully born.
• Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
• Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
• The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
• 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.
• 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.
• The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
• The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
• There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
• 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.
• There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?