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