Quotes by 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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask."

"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 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."

"Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want."

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

"Man always dies before he is fully born."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"Men are born equal but they are also born different."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties."

"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."

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

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

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

"To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable."

"In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead ; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead . In the nineteenth century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the twentieth century it means schizoid self-alienation. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots."