Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape.

Erich Fromm

The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.

Erich Fromm

What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture. That was present in the apes long before the brain began to develop. Nor is it the use of tools. It is something altogether new, a previously unknown quality: self-awareness. Animals, too, have awareness. They are aware of objects; they know this is one thing and that another. But when the human being as such was born he had a new and different consciousness, a consciousness of himself; he knew that he existed and that he was something different, something apart from nature, apart from other people, too. He experienced himself. He was aware that he thought and felt. As far as we know, there is nothing analogous to this anywhere in the animal kingdom. That is the specific quality that makes human beings human.

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

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

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.

Erich Fromm

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

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