Quotes from Erich Fromm

I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.

Integrity simple means not violating one's own identity.

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.

It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.

Death is never sweet, not even if it is suffered for the highest ideal.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

It seems that great minds a hundred years ago saw what would happen today or tomorrow, while we to whom it is happening blind ourselves in order not to be disturbed in our daily routine.

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.

The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.

Today, we talk a lot about equality, but I think what most people mean by it is sameness - that everybody is the same - and they are afraid if they are not the same, they are not equal.

I think if you ask what people really mean by happiness today, it is the experience of unlimited consumption - the kind of thing Mr. Huxley described in "Brave New World."

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.

Our vitality, and the vitality of each nation, rests on the sincerity and depth of the faith in the ideas which it announces, or pronounces.

Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.

We substitute, or we rather hide, this fear of real intimacy by a superficial kind of friendliness, which is quite nice, but nevertheless, very shallow.

Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be...Close your eyes let your spirit start to soar, and you'll live as you've never lived before.

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.

The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.

Freedom does not mean license.