Authors — Quotes

Erich Fromm Quotes: 13

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
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.
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.
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.
Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.
The Art of Loving
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
There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
Psychoanalysis and Religion
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die - although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
The Sane Society
We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent — people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.
To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche