Erich Fromm Life Quotations

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

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

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.

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.

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

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.

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

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

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

I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the "growth" of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence. Love is a productive orientation for which it is essential that there be present at the same time: concern, responsibility, and respect for and knowledge of the object of the union.

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

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

Independent of others and in concert with others, your main task in life is to do what you can best do and become what you can potentially be.

Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

But not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man.

Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.

The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.

A new question has arisen in modern man's mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living...No sensible answer can be given to the question...because the question does not make any sense.

The spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself sufficiently against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.

I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way.

Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life

That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.

Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.

The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is.

I believe that one can and must hope for a sane society that furthers man's capacity to love his fellow men, to work and create, to develop his reason and his objectivity of a sense of himself that is based on the experience of his productive energy. I believe that one can and must hope for the collective regaining of a mental health that is characterized by the capacity to love and to create...

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a "standing in," not a "falling for." In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.

Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.

If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem ofhuman existence, then any societywhich excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.

Mobilizing the love of life is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead.

People seek a new orientation, a new philosophy, one which is centered on the priorities of life-physically and spiritually-and not on the priorities of death.

. . . freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.