Quote

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

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
Paradoxically
Condition
Conditions
Alone
Ability
Love

More quotes by Erich Fromm

Image
If we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals...We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities.
Erich Fromm
Image
Love is not easy. All great religions postulate love as one of the greatest accomplishments. If it were that easy, or as easy as most people think, certainly, the great religious leaders would have been rather naive.
Erich Fromm
Image
Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
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
. . . freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.
Erich Fromm
Image
Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.
Erich Fromm
Image
All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual.
Erich Fromm
Image
We've wanted to produce more in the 19th century and the 20th century in order to give man the possibility for more dignified human life but actually what has happened is that production and consumption have become means - have ceased to be means and have become ends, and we are production crazy and consumption crazy.
Erich Fromm
Image
The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.
Erich Fromm
Image
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
Erich Fromm
Image
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm
Image
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
Erich Fromm
Image
Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.
Erich Fromm
Image
The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology.
Erich Fromm
Image
Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
Erich Fromm
Image
Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?..Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission?
Erich Fromm
Image
A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.
Erich Fromm
Image
Man absolutely cannot live by himself.
Erich Fromm
Image
Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.
Erich Fromm
Image
Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.
Erich Fromm