Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous.

Erich Fromm

Categorized in : Lying Love Power

The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

Erich Fromm

inner-peace insecurity business

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Erich Fromm

spiritual courage letting-go

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

Erich Fromm

effort greed needs

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

Erich Fromm

errors facts people

Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.

Erich Fromm

numbers culture ideas

It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.

Erich Fromm

moments love romantic

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.

Erich Fromm

strong decision feelings

Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.

Erich Fromm

products hate life

If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being 'asocial' or 'irrational' in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.

Erich Fromm

eye hurt long

Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.

Erich Fromm

doubt may civilization

Love is the child of freedom, never that of domination.

Erich Fromm

love-you love-is children

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.

Erich Fromm

machines powerful men

Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.

Erich Fromm

pessimism optimism despair

Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.

Erich Fromm

illusion want men

Respect is not fear and awe; it...[is]the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.

Erich Fromm

respect individuality unique

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

Erich Fromm

art-of-loving ability-to-love ability

The deepest need of the human being is to overcome our

Erich Fromm

being-alone loneliness overcoming

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

Erich Fromm

weakness power lust

The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.

Erich Fromm

individual birth giving

You have to stop in order to change direction.

Erich Fromm

order