Erich Fromm's Quotes

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

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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