About Author : Erich Pinchas Fromm was an internationally renowned Jewish German American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanistic philosopher. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
Erich Fromm Quotes and Quotations
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.
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
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.
Immature love says ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’
That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it for life is the miracle the inexplicable. In the act of destruction man sets himself above life he transcends himself as a creature. Thus the ultimate choice for a man inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself is to create or to destroy to love or to hate.
A new question has arisen in modern man’s mind the question namely whether life is worth living. No sensible answer can be given to the question…because the question does not make any sense.
Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully the former is essentially human the latter belongs to the animal part of man.
Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.
The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
Today I begin to understand what love must be if it exists. When we are parted we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be incompleteness in absence.
Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled to concentrate to accept conflict and tension to be born everyday to feel a sense of self.
If it were not for hopes the heart would break.
There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
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.
The aim of sadism is to transform a man into a thng something animate into something inanimate since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life-freedom.
Not he who has much is rich but he who gives much.
Love is union with somebody or something outside oneself under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.
If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Modern man thinks he loses something time when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.
The successful revolutionary is a statesman the unsuccessful one a criminal.
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.
The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned rational voluntary reaction to challenge.
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.
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
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.
Dreams – A microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.
Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself to become what he potentially is.
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 is to give birth to himself.