Quotes from Erich Fromm

looking for the next thing to do or the newest gadget to use is only a means of protecting oneself from being close to oneself or to another person.

But in many individuals in whom separateness is not relieved in other ways, the search for the sexual orgasm assumes a function which makes it not very different from alcoholism and drug addiction. It becomes a desperate attempt to escape the anxiety engendered by separateness, and it results in an ever-increasing sense of separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily. All

The assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object , not the problem of a faculty . People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love - or to be loved by- is difficult.

We have seen, then, that certain socioeconomic changes, notably the decline of the middle class and the rising power of monopolistic capital, had a deep psychological effect... Nazism resurrected the lower middle class psychologically while participating in the destruction of its old socioeconomic position. It mobilized its emotional energies to become an important force in the struggle for the economic and political aims of Germain imperialism.

They were more free, but they were more alone.

There were always men who looked beyond the dimensions of their own society- and while they may have been called fools or criminals in their time they are the roster of great men as far as the record of human history is concerned- and visualized something which can be called universally human and which is not identical with what a particular society assumes human nature to be. There were always men who were bold and imaginative enough to see beyond the frontiers of their own existence.

At the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it.

How should a man caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and of separateness?

The question is the same, for it springs from the same ground: the human situation, the conditions of the human existence. The answer varies. The question can be answered by animal worship, by human scrifice or military conquest, by indulgence in luxury, by ascetic renunciation, by obsessionnal work, by artistic creation, by the love of God, and by the love of Man.

The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love—is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.

Freedom is not something we have, there is no such thing as freedom. Freedom is a quality of our personality: we are more or less free to resist pressure, more or less free to do what we want and to be ourselves. Freedom is always a question of increasing freedom one has, or decreasing it.

Naces solo y mueres solo, y en el paréntesis la soledad es tan grande que necesitas compartir la vida para olvidarlo.

One can hardly overestimate people's need to talk about themselves and to be listened to.

If I am nothing but what I believe I am supposed to be—who am I?

What matters is the effect, not the process.

If one candle is brought into an absolutely dark room, the darkness disappears, and there is light. But if ten or a hundred or a thousand candles are added, the room will become brighter and brighter. Yet the decisive change was brought about by the first candle which penetrated the darkness.57

The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice.

Aliveness always makes a beautiful.

When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life of his children. But one is bound to fail within oneself and for the children. The former because the problem of existence can be solved by each one only for himself, and not by proxy; the latter because one lacks in the very qualities which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer.

My duty not to remain passive in a world which seems to be moving toward self-chosen catastrophe.

The unity achieved in productive work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is transitory; the unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence, they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love.

the newspapers, the magazines, television, and radio produce a commodity: news, from the raw material of events. Only news is salable, and the news media determine which events are news, which are not.

I wonder sometimes whether a person has to become insane these days in order to feel certain things. Lessing once said, "Who doesn't become insane over certain things, has no sanity to lose

The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other.