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

Erich Fromm

If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either.

Erich Fromm

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Erich Fromm

The intensity and excitement which accompanies moments of infatuation is frequently relative to the degree of loneliness and isolation which has been previously experienced.

Erich Fromm

Few parents have the courage and independence to care more for their children's happiness than for their success.

Erich Fromm

Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.

Erich Fromm

Love is a power which produces love.

Erich Fromm

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.

Erich Fromm

Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

Indeed the alienated person finds it almost impossible to remain by himself, because he is seized by the panic of experiencing nothingness.

Erich Fromm

Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

Erich Fromm

Man’s main task is to give birth to himself.

Erich Fromm

Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.

Erich Fromm

Equality today means sameness, rather than oneness.

Erich Fromm

We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

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

Erich Fromm

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