647 Quotes by Erich Fromm

El amor a la vida es el núcleo, un núcleo muy concreto y real, de todo tipo de amor. Quien crea que ama a los seres humanos sin amar la vida, puede desear apegarse a otra persona, pero no amarla de verdad. Nos imaginamos entonces a una persona que ama todo lo que crece y está vivo, que se siente atraída por el crecimiento infantil, por la maduración. Para semejante persona, incluso lo que no está vivo, como una piedra o el agua, se convierte en algo vivo.

since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present.

Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine.

The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle—is outside of his range of emotional experience.

Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being molded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds.

… the understanding of the reasons for the totalitarian flight from freedom is a premise for any action which aims at the victory over the totalitarian forces.

Mantener la propia opinión sobre una persona, aunque la opinión pública o algunos hechos imprevistos parezcan invalidarla, mantener las propias convicciones aunque éstas no sean populares: todo eso requiere fe y coraje. Tomar las dificultades, los reveses y penas de la vida como un desafío cuya superación nos hace más fuertes, y no como un injusto castigo que no tendríamos que recibir nosotros, requiere fe y coraje.

Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure.

The main condition preventing love is narcissism. The polar opposite of narcissism is objectivity. The way to have objectivity is reason. The attitude grounding reason is humility. To be objective, to use reason, is only possible if one has achieved an attitude of humility.