Quote

Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.

Erich Fromm

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Erich Fromm
Age: 79 †
Born: 1900
Born: March 23
Died: 1980
Died: March 18
Philosopher
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Choice
Create
Inasmuch
Choices
Inexplicable
Hate
Transcend
Men
Destroy
Love
Driven
Thus
Ultimate

More quotes by Erich Fromm

Image
To be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this, or that - there is always a fear that love could disappear.
Erich Fromm
Image
Love is hot a higher power which descends upon mn nor a duty which is imposed upon him it is his own power by which he relates himself to the world and makes it truly his.
Erich Fromm
Image
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Erich Fromm
Image
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
Erich Fromm
Image
The experience of separateness arouses anxiety it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.
Erich Fromm
Image
When an individual is awake, almost all he does and says is inspired by the model of behavior that the society imposes,even without his being aware of it.
Erich Fromm
Image
Jewish legend says that the world rests on 36 just men: only thirty six, but their moral strength is immense.
Erich Fromm
Image
We are terribly imaginative, as far as technique in science is concerned. As far as changes in social arrangements are concerned, we lack utterly in imagination.
Erich Fromm
Image
This Marxian sentence, repeated to the point of boredom, is misinterpreted. In reality [Karl] Marx was a religious man.
Erich Fromm
Image
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
Erich Fromm
Image
Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers who want to consume more and more and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated ... what is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow man and from nature.
Erich Fromm
Image
The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.
Erich Fromm
Image
I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism.
Erich Fromm
Image
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
Image
Society must be organized in such a way that mans social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.
Erich Fromm
Image
It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.
Erich Fromm
Image
Infantile love follows the principle: I love because I am loved. Mature love follows the principle: I am loved because I love. Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need you because I love you.
Erich Fromm
Image
In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue.
Erich Fromm
Image
If you take a salesman, who sells a useless commodity, he feels like a fraud.
Erich Fromm
Image
[Carl Gustav] Jung was not right when he said that the unconscious message is always written clearly and so there is no need to seek to discover the distortions, because one must recognize that many dreams are more or less distortions.
Erich Fromm