Quotes By Erich Fromm

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

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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