647 Quotes by Erich Fromm

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations.

People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love, power, fame, revenge. Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent.

Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.

In the view of the wise, Heaven is man and Earth woman: Earth fosters what Heaven lets fall.

Modern man thinks he loses something – time – when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.

Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.

That human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and hence that a whole society can be sick, is an assumption which was made very explicitly by Freud, most extensively in his Civilization and Its Discontent.

The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.

The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it.