Erich Fromm Quotes

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and in a sense tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother and to become fully independent.

Modern man thinks he loses something-time-when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains- except kill it.

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

Love means to commit oneself without guarantee to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown.

Why should anyone be so grateful for acceptance unless he doubts that he is acceptable, and why should a young, educated and successful couple have such doubts, if not due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves because they are not themselves.

Each new step into his new human existence is frightening. It always means to give up a secure state, which was relatively known, for one which is new, which one has not yet mastered. Undoubtedly, if the infant could think at the moment of the severance of the umbilical cord, he would experience the fear of dying. A loving fate protects us from this first panic. But at any new step, at any new stage of our birth, we are afraid again. We are never free from two conflicting tendencies: one to emerge from the womb, from the animal form of existence into a more human existence, from bondage to freedom; another, to return to the womb, to nature, to certainty and security.

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.