Quotes By Erich Fromm
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.
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.
Erich Fromm
The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Erich Fromm
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
Erich Fromm
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
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.
Erich Fromm
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.
Erich Fromm
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
Erich Fromm
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
Erich Fromm
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
Erich Fromm
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.
Erich Fromm
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.
Erich Fromm
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.
Erich Fromm
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
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.
Erich Fromm
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
Erich Fromm