Quotes By Erich Fromm

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.

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

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

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

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

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

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

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

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.

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

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

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.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

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