Quotes by Erich Fromm

“Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need you because I love you”

“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.”

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

“There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.”

“Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines”

“To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness”

“There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.”

“Man always dies before he is fully born.”

“Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.”

“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love”

“To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”

“If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?”

“A vast sector of modern advertising... does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.”

“Advertising mourishes the consuming power of men. It sets up before a man the goal of a better home, better clothing, better food for himself and his family. It spurs individual exertion and greater production.”

“In day-to-day commerce, television is not so much interested in the business of communications as in the business of delivering audiences to advertisers. People are the merchandise, not the shows. The shows are merely the bait.”

“The Death of Advertising? I think thats in the book of Revelation. Its the day when people everywhere become satisfied with their weight, their hair, their skin, their wardrobe, and their aroma.”

“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.”

“Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.”

“I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”

“The child learns so easily because he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons”