Erich Fromm Quotes

You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople." - J.R. Isidore

Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. None of us can be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human emerge only in the ways we relate to other people.

I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

People live, work, walk, play, shop, study, and eat with other people. There are few desert dwellers who live alone without depending in some way on people.

Man is not meant to live alone.

Human beings are not meant to live alone. There is a fundamental biological imperative that propels you and every organism on this planet to be in a community, to be in relationship with other organisms.

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.

People are longing to rediscover true community. We have had enough of loneliness, independence and competition.

The building of friendship, family, community and love is complicated. We are so isolated in this country, no longer supported by tribes and villages.

I rely on other people every day of my life.

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.

He has learned that God uses solitude to teach us how to live with other people.

There is a Jewish notion that holiness is found with other people. To understand what life really is, one has to share it.

You can be with other people, which is ideal, or you can be alone.

How does one keep from "growing old inside"? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people.... Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.

You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected.

Friendship, if somebody holds out his hand toward you, you've got to reach and take it... There are too many people alone, and if you're lucky enough for somebody to want you as a friend, it's an obligation.

it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody

I know enough to know that no man is an island.

Trust me on this: no one is better off alone.

The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.

Success is nothing if you don't have the right people to share it with; you're just gonna end up lonely.

We are all in this together, by ourselves.