Erich Fromm

“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...”

“Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.”

“We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”

“Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.”

“Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.”

“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.”

“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.”

“The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.”

“Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'”

“Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.”

“The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.”

“The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.”

“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...”

“Authority is not a quality one person 'has', in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as...”

“In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”

“In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”

“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.”

“The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.”

“There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.”

“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”