Quotes from Erich Fromm

One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one's life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.

Man is the only animal that can be bored.

Giving is the highest expression of potency.

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

Man absolutely cannot live by himself.

It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.

For despite what some people say, love is not only a sweet falling bound to come and quickly go away.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

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

I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is, they would say, if they are honest, that it is a big department store, with new things every week - all the money to buy them, and maybe a little more than the neighbours.

In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.

Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the same time the beginning of his freedom and the development of his reason.

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

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.

Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.

The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense of life.

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.

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

We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.

The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things.

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.

The state of sleep is a state of freedom in which man is not occupied with the manipulation of 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.