647 Quotes by 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.

To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death.

One can hardly overestimate people’s need to talk about themselves and to be listened to.

People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love – or to be loved by – is difficult.

How should a man caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and of separateness?

Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called “equality.

Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with – the love of life.

Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.

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.