Erich Fromm Quotes

Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.

Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?

At the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.

I was given several types of torture… I was given what they called the ‘water cure’…I felt…like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.

… cast into a burning hell

For 30 years, I lived in pure hell.

Let me be boiled to death with melancholy.

Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot.

The bodies of the damned shall be crowded together in hell, like grapes in a wine-press, which press one another till they burst; every distinct sense and organ shall be assailed with its own appropriate and most exquisite sufferings.

Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.

Bored with the same type of misery over and over and over again.

Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.

At a certain stage of misery, you'll try anything to explain what's going on with you, even if you know it doesn't explain a thing and it's one failed explanation after another.

There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad humanity must assume the aspect of Hell.

And when he had put his hand on mine with a cheerful look, wherefrom I took courage, he brought me within to the secret things. Here sighs, laments, and deep wailings were resounding through the starless air; wherefore at first I wept thereat. Strange tongues, horrible utterances, words of woe, accents of anger, voices high and faint, and sounds of hands with them, were making a tumult which whirls always in that air forever dark, like the sand when the whirlwind breathes.

I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom.

He supposed that even in Hell, people got an occasional sip of water, if only so they could appreciate the full horror of unrequited thirst when it set in again.

Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

Now it is nothing but torture.

And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead (suicide note)

If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine.

You'd think I was shoving bamboo splinters under your nails. (Alice from Twilight)

Grief dejects and wrings the tortured soul.