Erich Fromm

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found.

Understanding a person does not mean condoning it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him

Integrity simple means not violating one's own identity.

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

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

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

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

The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

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.

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I

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

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

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.

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

The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

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

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

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

Women are equal because they are not different any more

The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.

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.

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.