Erich Fromm

To be concentrated means to live fully in the present.

Love means to commit oneself without guarantee to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

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

A relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading radio-listening culture.

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.

True love is like a pair of socks: you gotta have two and they've gotta match.

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

We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams... we are also more inteligent wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake.

Let your mind start a journey thru a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be...Close your eyes let your spirit start to soar and youll live as youve never lived before.

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.

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

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

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

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

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

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

Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper the wish to know the secret of things and of life.

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

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

Mans 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.

Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.

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

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.

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

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

While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements.

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.

Fortitude is the capacity to say no when the world wants to hear yes.

Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers.

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

Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings...Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality they cripple man and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer.

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.

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.

Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled to concentrate to accept conflict and tension to be born everyday to feel a sense of self.

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

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

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

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

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

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

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.

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment which excludes the ability to experience happiness.

It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.

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

Men are born equal but they are also born different.

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment.

Let your mind start a journey thru a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be...Close your eyes let your spirit start to soar, and you'll live as you've never lived before.

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to his fellow men 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.

Love isnt something natural. Rather it requires discipline concentration patience faith and the overcoming of narcissism. It isnt a feeling it is a practice.

Socialism is the abolition of human self-alienation, the return of man as a real human being.

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. Patriotism is its cult.

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

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

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

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

Man always dies before he is fully born.

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

The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love.

The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

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.

Nationalism is our form of incest is our idolatry is our insanity. Patriotism is its cult.

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.

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

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

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

Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not grown.

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.

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.

Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings.

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

I would say our social relationships are relatively shallow. We are actually afraid to be intimate, with people - many people even with their wives and husbands.

Giving is the highest expression of potency...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.

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.

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.

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

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.

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.

Mothers love is peace. It need not be acquired it need not be deserved.

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

A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.

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

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.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.