Quotes from Erich Fromm

Authority is not a quality one person 'has', in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.

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.

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.

What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.

What we have in common is a mass men, a mass bureaucracy, and a manipulation of everyone to act smoothly, but with the illusion that he follows his own decisions and opinions.

Man can only know the nagation, never the position of ultimate reality.

On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man's need for collective art and ritual.

The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.

Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.

We are all equal in the sense that no man must mean - must be - the means for the purposes of another man; but each individual is an end in itself.

Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.

This Marxian sentence, repeated to the point of boredom, is misinterpreted. In reality [Karl] Marx was a "religious" man.

Mother's love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there it is as if all the beauty had gone out of life.

Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

Happiness should be something which results from the creative, genuine, intense relatedness - awareness, responsiveness, to everything in life - to man, to nature.

Mother is the home we come from. She is nature, soil, ocean.

I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.

Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.

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

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.

Mother's love always peace as it not to be acquired nor deserved.

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.

The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.

According to me [Sigmund ] Freud did not notice that the dream expresses the inner experiences in a symbolic form,resembling in that, poetry or other art forms.