Erich Fromm Quotes

 

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

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

Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.

If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being 'asocial' or 'irrational' in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.

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

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.

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

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

Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.

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.

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

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

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

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