Quotes from Erich Fromm

Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity.

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?

Life is like a piano... what you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Love is not something your heart falls into, but something that picks it up and sets it soaring.

I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion

Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.

We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.

Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

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.

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'

Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

I need you because I love you.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists.... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it

In love, the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have tr

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.