"True love is like a pair of socks: you gotta have two and they've gotta match."
Read quote
83 likes
Quote collection
Erich Fromm quotes (page 2 of 22)
426 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
Read quote
79 likes
"To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values."
Read quote
79 likes
"Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either."
Read quote
78 likes
"When people can't handle God any more, they turn to religion."
Read quote
77 likes
"Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies."
Read quote
74 likes
"Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved."
Read quote
69 likes
"The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced -- by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix."
Read quote
68 likes
"If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences,that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, i perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood. This relatedness from center to center - instead of that from periphery to periphery - is 'central relatedness'."
Read quote
67 likes
"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"
Read quote
67 likes
"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."
Read quote
61 likes
"The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love."
Read quote
55 likes
"It is time to cease to argue about God , and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry."
Read quote
54 likes
"...in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving. Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which "only" profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend energy on?"
Read quote
52 likes
"Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations."
Read quote
52 likes
"Today it is not alive. What, then, is this experience of humanism? With the above survey I have tried to show you that the experience of humanism is that — as Terence expressed it — “Nothing human is alien to me”; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist in myself. I am the criminal and I am the saint. I am the child and I am the adult. I am the man who lived a hundred thousand years ago and I am the man who, provided we don't destroy the human race, will live hundred thousand years from now."
Read quote
51 likes
"People do not see that the main question is not : "Am I loved?" which is to a large extent the question : "Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?" The main question is: "Can I love?"
Read quote
50 likes
"Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable."
Read quote
48 likes
"To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness"
Read quote
45 likes
"I need you because I love you."
Read quote
45 likes