Author Profile
Erich Fromm
1900 – 1980 • American • Psychologist
48
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 48 quotesBoth 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.— Erich Fromm
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.— 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.— Erich Fromm
The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.— Erich Fromm
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.— 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.— Erich Fromm
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.— Erich Fromm
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.— Erich Fromm
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.— 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.— Erich Fromm
To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.— Erich Fromm
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.— Erich Fromm
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.— Erich Fromm
Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.— Erich Fromm
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.— Erich Fromm