Erich Fromm Quotes
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.
Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you'll live as you've never lived before.
Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.
Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.
The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is.
The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.
We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.
Mother's love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there it is as if all the beauty had gone out of life.
Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.
We talk a great deal about Russia today, and I'm afraid that in twenty years, we and Russia will be more similar than different.
While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements.
It seems that great minds a hundred years ago saw what would happen today or tomorrow, while we to whom it is happening blind ourselves in order not to be disturbed in our daily routine.
Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity, in the many ways in which such violation is possible.
When people can see a vision and simultaneously recognize what can be done step by step in a concrete way to achieve it, they will begin to feel encouragement and enthusiasm instead of fright.
But not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man.
The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
I think what democracy means today, in reality, is to a large extent, manipulated consent - not forced consent, manipulated consent - and manipulated more and more with the help of Madison Avenue.
Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.
Independent of others and in concert with others, your main task in life is to do what you can best do and become what you can potentially be.
There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
Human history began with an act of disobedience and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience.
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.
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.
Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love towards themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others.
The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense of life.
Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.
When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.
To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
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.
