Erich Fromm Quotes

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

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

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

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.

Men are born equal but they are also born different.

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.

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

Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be. Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you'll live as you've never lived before.

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

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.

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

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

The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

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

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

Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.

Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.

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

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

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found- in himself.

Integrity simply means not violating one's own identity.

Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.

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.

Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become ''Golems,'' they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.