Quotes from Erich Fromm

Selfishness is not identical with self-love but with its very opposite. Selfishness is one kind of greediness. Like all greediness, it contains an insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

If a person does not emerge from incestuous attachment to mother, clan, nation, if he retains the childish dependence on a punishing and rewarding father, or any other authority, he cannot develop a more mature love for God; then his religion is that of the earlier phase of religion, in which God was experienced as an all-protective mother or a punishing rewarding father. In

The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love

Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of destruction.

Si percibo en otra persona nada más que lo superficial, percibo principalmente las diferencias, lo que nos separa. Si penetro hasta el núcleo, percibo nuestra identidad, el hecho de nuestra hermandad.

The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either.

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.

Only dogmatic thinking, the result of the laziness of mind and heart, tries to construct simplistic schemes of the either-or type that block any real understanding.

Jesus and Satan appear here as repre sentatives of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and Man. Jesus is the representative of being, and of the idea that not-having is the premise for being. The world has followed Satan's principles, since the time of the gospels.

The sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily..

To be naive and easily deceived is impermissible, today more than ever, when the prevailing untruths may lead to a catastrophe because they blind people to real dangers and real possibilities.

modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.

A free person owes an explanation only to himself, to his reason and his conscious, and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.

If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune.

Der Mensch] würde dem Wahnsinn verfallen, wenn er sich nicht aus diesem Gefängnis befreien könnte - wenn er nicht in irgendeiner Form seine Hände nach anderen Menschen ausstrecken und sich mit der Welt außerhalb seiner selbst vereinigen könnte.

Erkenntnis] ist nur möglich, wenn ich mein eigenes Interesse transzendiere und den anderen so sehe, wie er wirklich ist.

To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid.

Man schließt zu zweit einen Bund gegen die Welt und hält dann diesen égoisme à deux irrtümlich für Liebe und Vertrautheit.

Buddhist concept of mindfulness means precisely a way of being in which one is fully concentrated on everything one is doing at any given moment, whether it is planting a seed or cleaning a room or eating. Or as a Zen master has said: "When I sleep I sleep, when I eat I eat …" 10.

Man can attempt to become one with the world by submission to a person, to a group, to an institution, to God. In this way, he transcends the separateness of his individual existence by becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself, and experiences his identity in connection with the power to which he has submitted.

The polarity between the male and female principles exists also within each man and each woman. Just as physiologically man and woman each have hormones of the opposite sex, they are bisexual also in the psychological sense. They carry in themselves the principle of receiving and of penetrating, of matter and of spirit. Man—and woman—finds union within himself only in the union of his female and his male polarity. This polarity is the basis for all creativity.

Free man is by necessity insecure; thinking man by necessity uncertain.

Few parents have the courage and independence to care more for their children's happiness than for their success.

Faith, in the having mode, is a crutch for those who want to be certain, those who want an answer to life without daring to search for it themselves.