More Quotes by Erich Fromm
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love
When people can't handle God any more, they turn to religion.
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found- in himself.
The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane
We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears
