As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
- Erich Fromm Quote

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
- Erich Fromm Quote

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
- Erich Fromm Quote

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
- Erich Fromm Quote

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
- Erich Fromm Quote

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.
- Erich Fromm Quote

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.
- Erich Fromm Quote

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
- Erich Fromm Quote

Man always dies before he is fully born.
- Erich Fromm Quote

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
- Erich Fromm Quote

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.
- Erich Fromm Quote

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
- Erich Fromm Quote

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
- Erich Fromm Quote

Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
- Erich Fromm Quote

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
- Erich Fromm Quote

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
- Erich Fromm Quote

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.
- Erich Fromm Quote

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
- Erich Fromm Quote

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
- Erich Fromm Quote

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
- Erich Fromm Quote

The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
- Erich Fromm Quote

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
- Erich Fromm Quote

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
- Erich Fromm Quote

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
- Erich Fromm Quote

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.
- Erich Fromm Quote

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

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
- Erich Fromm Quote