Top 430 Quotes & Sayings by Erich Fromm - Page 2

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

Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.

To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.

You have to stop in order to change direction.

The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.

Giving is the highest expression of potency.

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.

Love is the child of freedom, never that of domination.

FORTITUDE IS THE CAPACITY TO SAY NO WHEN THE WORLD WANTS TO HEAR 'YES'

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

If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences,that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, i perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood. This relatedness from center to center - instead of that from periphery to periphery - is 'central relatedness'.

Integrity simply means not violating one's own identity.

There is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves. And there is nothing which brings us greater joy and happiness than to think, feel, and say what is ours.

Organized religion is in substance a mystification, a means of hiding the wickedness of the social system. If the Christian principles of love, equality, and freedom were really practiced instead of only preached, there would be no need for a special institution(the church) to take care of those principles.

I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.

Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.

We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.

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.

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.

To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.

We must make a decision of values.

Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities and the connection that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable.

People do not see that the main question is not : "Am I loved?" which is to a large extent the question : "Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?" The main question is: "Can I love?

A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.

Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

Equality today means ‘sameness’, rather than ‘oneness’.

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.

Man is the only animal that can be bored.

Happiness does not exclude sadness - if a person responds to life, he's sometimes happy and sometimes sad. What matters is he responds.

Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.

...in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving. Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which "only" profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend energy on?

Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.

One cannot fall in love, really; one has to be in love.

Freedom is the fundamental condition for any growth.

Today it is not alive. What, then, is this experience of humanism? With the above survey I have tried to show you that the experience of humanism is that — as Terence expressed it — “Nothing human is alien to me”; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist in myself. I am the criminal and I am the saint. I am the child and I am the adult. I am the man who lived a hundred thousand years ago and I am the man who, provided we don't destroy the human race, will live hundred thousand years from now.

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found- in himself.

The deepest need of the human being is to overcome our separateness, to leave the prison of our loneliness.

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.

When people can't handle God any more, they turn to religion.

Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated ... what is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow man and from nature.

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

Well-being is possible to the degree to which one has overcome one's narcissism; to the degree to which one is open, responsive, sensitive, awake, empty.... Well-being means, finally, to drop one's Ego, to give up greed, to cease chasing after preservation and the aggrandizement of the Ego, to be and to experience one's self in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using.

The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.

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

Every act of irreverence for life, every act which neglects life, which is indifferent to and wastes life, is a step towards the love of death. This choice man must make at every minute. Never were the consequences of the wrong choice as total and as irreversible as they are today. Never was the warning of the Bible so urgent: 'I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live.'

Let your mind start a journey through 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.

That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the "growth" of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence. Love is a productive orientation for which it is essential that there be present at the same time: concern, responsibility, and respect for and knowledge of the object of the union.

Love is the only way of knowledge, which in the act of union answers my quest. In the act of loving, of giving myself, in the act of penetrating the other person, I find myself, I discover myself, I discover us both, I discover man.

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

The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own

Happiness is a man's greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside.

Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.

Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book.

We try to evade the question of existence with property, prestige, power, possession, production, fun, and, ultimately, by trying to forget that we- that I- exist. No matter how much he thinks of God or goes to church, or how much he believes in religious ideas , if he, the whole man, is deaf to the question of existence, if he does not have an answer to it, he is marking time, and he lives and dies like one of the million things he produces. He thinks of God, instead of experiencing God.

Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.

Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a "standing in," not a "falling for." In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.

A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet 'for sale', who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society.

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.