Quotes By Erich Fromm

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

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

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'

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

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

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

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

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.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

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.

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?

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

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.

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.