Erich Fromm quotes - page 2

Giving is the highest expression of potency. (Erich Fromm)
Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. View quote
Erich Fromm
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love. View quote
Erich Fromm
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers. View quote
Erich Fromm
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. View quote
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. View quote
Erich Fromm
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you. View quote
Erich Fromm
The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone. View quote
Erich Fromm
I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought. View quote
Erich Fromm
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. View quote
Erich Fromm
The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. (Erich Fromm)
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. View quote
Erich Fromm
I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way. View quote
Erich Fromm
Psychoanalysis, which interprets the human being as a socialized being, and the psychic apparatus as essentially developed and determined through the relationship of the individual to society, must consider it a duty to participate in the investigation of sociological problems to the extent the human being or his/her psyche plays any part at all. View quote
Erich Fromm
Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations. View quote
Erich Fromm
Chronic boredom compensated or uncompensated constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition. View quote
Erich Fromm
The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a "loving" mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation. View quote
Erich Fromm
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love. View quote
Erich Fromm
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. View quote
Erich Fromm
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. View quote
Erich Fromm
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself. (Erich Fromm)
Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self. View quote
Erich Fromm
While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements. View quote
Erich Fromm
Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. View quote
Erich Fromm
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. View quote
Erich Fromm