Quotes from Erich Fromm

A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.

Freedom, although it has brought [modern man] independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless.

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

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.

Man's nature, his passions and anxieties, are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of what we call history.

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.

We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams... we are also more inteligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake.

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

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.

Dreams - A microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.

Man may be defined as the animal that can say I, that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

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.

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

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.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become Golems, they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.

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.

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.

We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.