The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. – Erich Fromm
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. – Erich Fromm
Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’ – Erich Fromm
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. – Erich Fromm
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. – Erich Fromm
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. – Erich Fromm
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. – Erich Fromm
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world. – Erich Fromm
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. – Erich Fromm
The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. – Erich Fromm
Authority is not a quality one person ‘has’, in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him. – Erich Fromm
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality. – Erich Fromm
