Erich Fromm Quotes
A German-American psychologist and humanistic philosopher.
(1900 - 1980)
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As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
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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.
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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.
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Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
[Creativity]
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Free man is by necessity insecure; thinking man is by necessity uncertain.
[Acceptance]
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Giving is the highest expression of potency.
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Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
[Greed]
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I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is, they would say, if they are honest, that it is a big department store, with new things every week - all the money to buy them, and maybe a little more than the neighbours.
[Religion]
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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.
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If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
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If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue - and not a vice - to love myself, since I am a human being too.
[Introspection]
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Immature love says "I love you because I need you." Mature love says "I need you because I love you."
[Love]
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In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
[Love]
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In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
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Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity.
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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.
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Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
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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.
[Love]
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Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
[Life]
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Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
[Love]
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