Erich Fromm Quotes

Everybody has a lot of darkness in them because without that you're not a whole person.

I enjoy learning about different periods and people, and then taking what's universal about the human condition and seeing where it matches up. No matter where you are, certain things unite everybody.

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.

The trouble is, I just don't know if I'm too human or not human enough.

I think everybody can identify, you know, with this sort of struggle to decide for yourself who you are, you know, and what your place in life is.

So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.

The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us,...The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being's difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.

I am nothing but I must be everything.

This word 'individual' is beautiful; it means indivisible. Right now as you are, you are divided. You are only many fragments clinging together anyhow without any center being there, without any master in the house, with only servants. And for a moment any servant can become the master.

There has to be a balance, Vin," Elend said. "Somehow, we'll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be." He sighed. "But for now," he said, nodding to the side, "we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.

The distance runner is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace unique; the everyday eternal.

Man has little needs and deeper needs. We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness.

Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?

It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person

I have to introduce the part of me that feels like a winner to the part of me convinced I’m a loser, and see if they can’t agree to exist somewhere closer to the middle.

I am myself. That is not enough.

Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.

We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self..."

The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps out of the center of being.

We should be in harmony with our own consciousness; our mind, body, and soul should be one in interest and in purpose. And in that unified condition, we can actually express that natural innate love that we have found in our own life in everything we do in the world.

Meditation is not of the body, not of the mind, not of the soul. Meditation simply means your body, your mind, your soul, all functioning in such a harmony, in such wholeness, humming so beautifully... that they are in a melody, they are one. Your whole being - body, mind, soul - is involved in meditation.

How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.

Hey Rid?" She stopped and turned to look at him, almost ruefully. Like she couldn't help what she was any more then a shark could help being a shark, but if she could... "Yeah, Shrinky Dink?" "You're not all bad." She looked right at him and almost smiled. "You know what they say. Maybe I'm just drawn that way.

There was once a man, Harry, called the steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life.