Erich Fromm quotes

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. (Erich Fromm)
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.
Erich Fromm
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape.
Erich Fromm
Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
Erich Fromm
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
Erich Fromm
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
Erich Fromm
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
Erich Fromm
I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between "life" and "death"; between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission.
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
Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.
Erich Fromm
Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture. (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
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Erich Fromm
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
Erich Fromm
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.
Erich Fromm
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
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
To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
Erich Fromm
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
Erich Fromm
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. (Erich Fromm)
If I am what I have and what I have is lost, who then am I.
Erich Fromm
I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.
Erich Fromm
Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
Erich Fromm
The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
Erich Fromm