Erich Fromm

A ânsia de poder não é originada da força, mas da fraqueza.

A principal missão do homem, na vida, é dar luz a si mesmo e tornar-se aquilo que ele é potencialmente.

A busca da felicidade é uma das principais fontes de infelicidade.

O amor imaturo diz: eu te amo porque preciso de ti.

O amor maturo diz: eu preciso de ti porque te amo

Você tem que parar para mudar de direcção.

O amor é uma actividade, não um afecto passivo; é um ato de firmeza, não de fraqueza... é propriamente dar, e não receber.

O perigo do passado era que os homens se tornassem escravos. O perigo do futuro é que os homens se tornem autómatos.

As nossas maiores dissimulações são desenvolvidas não para esconder o que há de ruim e feio em nós, mas o nosso vazio. A coisa mais difícil de esconder é aquilo que não existe.

A única forma de prever o futuro é ter poder para formar o futuro.

Dizem que o talento cria suas próprias oportunidades. Mas às vezes parece que a vontade intensa cria não apenas suas próprias oportunidades, mas seus próprios talentos.

Estamos mais preparados para tentar o não tentado quando o que fazemos é inconsequente.

Num tempo de mudanças drásticas, são os que aprendem que irão possuir o futuro. Os cultos geralmente encontram-se equipados para viver num mundo que já não existe.

Você nunca consegue o suficiente daquilo que você não precisa para torná-lo feliz.

Os elementos mais dotados da espécie humana encontram-se no auge da sua criatividade quando as suas vontades não são satisfeitas.

Saber significa ver a realidade em sua nudez.

Ter esperanças é uma condição essencial de ser humano.

O passo mais importante para chegar a concentrar-se é aprender a estar sozinho consigo mesmo.

O amor é a última e real necessidade do ser humano.

A felicidade é a aceitação corajosa da vida.

 O excesso de estudo torna os homens burros.

A vida se torna uma escolha quando entendemos que morrer é uma opção.

A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.

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

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

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.

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.

Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

He gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humour, of his sadness -- of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other's sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him.

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

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.

The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.

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. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.

The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the development of humility, objectivity and reason.

I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behaviour, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life

Freedom does not mean license.

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.

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

Love is an act of faith.

If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgements of others.

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

We may know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts we make, we do not know ourselves. We know our fellow man, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellow man is not a thing. The further we reach into the depths of our being, on someone else's being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us.

Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure.



 En realidad, sólo existe el acto de amar, que es una actividad productiva. Implica cuidar, conocer, responder, afirmar, gozar de una persona, de un árbol, de una pintura, de una idea. Significa dar vida, aumentar su vitalidad. Es un proceso que se desarrolla y se intensifica a sí mismo.