Erich Fromm

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.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.

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.

The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

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.

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

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

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.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.