Erich Fromm

Ranking: 43rd
Biography of Erich Fromm
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Quote	Categories	Rating	Rate
"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."	Life, Men
"Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man."	Art, Honesty, Intelligence
"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."	Birth, Effort, Life
"Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines."	Education, Men, School
"The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have."	Desires, Wants
"Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists.... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence."	Art, Books, Imagination
"Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self."	Acceptance, Conflict, Creativity
"If it were not for hopes, the heart would break."	Art, Hope, Wishing
"There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail."	Failure, Freedom, Liberty
"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."	Art, Failure, Hope
"The aim of sadism is to transform a man into a thng, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life-freedom."	Freedom, Friends, Liberty
"Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much."	Miscellaneous
"Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self."	Love
"If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated."	Age, Faith, Intelligence
"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."	Age, Doubt, Men
"Modern man thinks he loses something; time; when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains; except kill it."	Knowledge, Men, Time
"The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal."	Crime, Men, Success
"Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'"	Love
"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?"	Effort, Happiness, Joy
"The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge."	Excellence, History, Men
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Browse Erich Fromm quotes by category:

Ability	Acceptance	Age
Art	Birth	Books
Change	Conflict	Creativity
Crime	Desires	Destruction
Doubt	Dreams	Education
Effort	Excellence	Failure
Faith	Freedom	Friends
Friendship	Happiness	History
Honesty	Hope	Imagination
Intelligence	Joy	Knowledge
Liberty	Lies	Life
Love	Men	Miscellaneous
Monarchy	Power	Quotations
Reading	School	Sin
Sleeping	Success	Teaching
Time	Truth	Wants
War	Wisdom	Wishing