Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
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Quotes by Erich Fromm
Explore 28 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Erich Fromm. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by Erich Fromm
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
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.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
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.
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.
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
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.
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
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