Erich Fromm

"Immature love says "I love you because I need you." Mature love says "I need you because I love you."

"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."

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

"If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being it must be a virtue - and not a vice - to love myself since I am a human being too."

"Man absolutely cannot live by himself."

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

"Giving is the highest expression of potency."

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

"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."

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

"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."

"Man is the only animal that can be bored."

"One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom not knowing what to do with oneself and one's life. Even if man had no monetary or any other reward he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces."

"Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man by necessity uncertain."

"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."

"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 loves says ' I love because I need you. Mature love says I need you because I love you."

"If America and the Western world continue in their state of unconscious hopelessness, lack of faith and of fortitude, it is predictable that they will not be able to resist the temptation of the big bang by nuclear weapons, which would end all problems - overpopulation, boredom, and hunger - since it would do away with all life."

"It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health."

"The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things."