QUOTES by Erich Fromm
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
There is no word in our language which has been so much misused and prostituted as the word love. It has been preached by those who were ready to condone every cruelty if it served their purpose; it has been used as a disguise under which to force people into sacrificing their own happiness, into submitting their whole self to those who profited from this surrender. [...] It has been made so empty that for many people love may mean no more than that two people have lived together for twenty years just without fighting more often than once a week.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you'
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Infantile love follows the principle: ""I love because I am loved."" Mature love follows the principle: ""I am loved because I love."" Immature love says: ""I love you because I need you."" Mature love says: ""I need you because I love you.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ''Patriotism'' is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by ''patriotism'' I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare --never with its power over other nations. 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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists.... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
Quote by -Erich Fromm
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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
Quote by -Erich Fromm
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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life - freedom.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
The experience of humanism is that 'nothing human is alien to me'; that I carry within myself all of humanity; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist in myself. I am the criminal and the saint. I am the child and the adult. I am the man who lived 100000 years ago and the man who will live 100000 years from now.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way; but only "almost.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one's life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
A new question has arisen in modern man's mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living...No sensible answer can be given to the question...because the question does not make any sense.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Basically, there can only be two answers. One is to overcome separateness and find unity by regression to the state of unity which existed before awareness ever arose, that is, before man was born. The other answer is to be fully born, to develop one's awareness, one's reason, one's capacity to love to such a point that one transcends one's own egocentric involvement, and arrives at a new harmony, at a new oneness with the world.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. 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.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
All great art is by its very essence in conflict with the society with which it exists. It expresses the truth about the existence regardless of whether this truth serves or hinders the survival purpose of a given society. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life
Quote by -Erich Fromm
That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.
Quote by -Erich Fromm
Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.p97.
Quote by -Erich Fromm