Quotes 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."
~Erich Fromm~
Love means to commit oneself without
guarantee, to give oneself completely in
the hope that our love will produce love
in the loved person. Love is an act of faith,
and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.
~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~
Not he who has much is rich,
but he who gives much.
~Erich Fromm~
Creativity requires the
courage to let go of certainties.
~Erich Fromm~
Understanding a person
does not mean condoning;
it only means that one does
not accuse him as if one were
God or a judge placed above him.
~Erich Fromm~
There can be no real freedom
without the freedom to fail.
~Erich Fromm~
Love is the only sane and satisfactory
answer to the problem of human existence.
~Erich Fromm~
Man's main task in life
is to give birth to himself,
to become what he potentially
is. The most important product
of his effort is his own personality.
~Erich Fromm~
Men are born equal but
they are also born different.
~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.
~Erich Fromm~
Conditions for creativity are to
be puzzled; to concentrate;
to accept conflict and tension;
to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.
~Erich Fromm~
Mother's love is peace.
It need not be acquired,
it need not be deserved.
~Erich Fromm~
In love, the paradox occurs that two
beings become one and yet remain two.
~Erich Fromm~
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts
the person in an endless effort to satisfy
the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
~Erich Fromm~
To spare oneself from grief at all
cost can be achieved only at the
price of total detachment, which
excludes the ability to experience happiness.
~Erich Fromm~
The mother-child relationship is paradoxical
and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most
intense love on the mother's side, yet this
very love must help the child grow away from
the mother, and to become fully independent.
~Erich Fromm~
We all dream; we do not understand our
dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange
goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least
by comparison with the logical, purposeful
doings of our minds when we are awake.
~Erich Fromm~
Let your mind start a journey thru a
strange new world. Leave all thoughts
of the world you knew before. Let your
soul take you where you long to be...
Close your eyes let your spirit start to soar,
and you'll live as you've never lived before.
~Erich Fromm~
While every human being has a
capacity for love, its realization is
one of the most difficult achievements.
~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~
Like the effect of advertising upon
the customer, the methods of political
propaganda tend to increase the feeling
of insignificance of the individual voter.
~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~
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~
song playing....Butterfly Kisses