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. - Erich Fromm
We are what we do. - Erich Fromm
Immature love says:"I love you because i need you". Mature love says: " I need you because i love you". - Erich Fromm
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love - Erich Fromm
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives to his life by the unfolding of his powers. - Erich Fromm
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding of his powers. - Erich Fromm
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal. - Erich Fromm
The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep. - Erich Fromm
The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life. - Erich Fromm
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve. - Erich Fromm
Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream. - Erich Fromm
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. - Erich Fromm
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality. - 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 bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things. - Erich Fromm
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. - Erich Fromm
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. - 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 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. - Erich Fromm
Man's main task is to give birth to himself. - Erich Fromm
It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health. - 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
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you. - Erich Fromm
The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge. - Erich Fromm
Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint. - Erich Fromm