Erich Fromm Quotes

The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles - preferably of his own making - in order to triumph.

Everyone is handed adversity in life. No one's journey is easy. It's how they handle it that makes people unique.

I think everyone in their life goes through challenges, whether it's love or money, kids or illness... You have to really not run away from that stuff.

The hardest things in my life have made me who I am.

It's all the stuff I've been through in my life. From family struggles, people doubting me, things I went through as a child and going to prison, they all played a factor in who I am today. It really made me a better person. Going through those situations can make or break you as a human being.

The hero wanders, the hero suffers, the hero returns. You are that hero.

Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures.

Life takes hold of us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought.

The lion who breaks the enemy's ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.

I would want people to take away this idea that sometimes people's problems or neuroses are really the things that are kind of a blessing in disguise, and even though there's sometimes pain associated with these things that sometimes in the face of adversity with obstacles to overcome, people can really kind of soar and find their higher selves.

Out of the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest heights.

The beast that bears you fastest to perfection is suffering.

The things that go wrong for you have a lot of potential to become part of your gift to the world.

When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.

Nothing in life has happened to you. It's happened for you. Every disappointment. Every wrong. Even every closed door has helped make you into who you are.

The sculptor will chip off all unnecessary material to set free the angel. Nature will chip and pound us remorselessly to bring out our possibilities. She will strip us of wealth, humble our pride, humiliate our ambition, let us down from the ladder of fame, will discipline us in a thousand ways, if she can develop a little character. Everything must give way to that. Wealth is nothing, position is nothing, fame is nothing, manhood is everything.

He whom prosperity humbles, and adversity strengthens, is the true hero.

Although it may seem like it, life will never give you more than you can handle. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy; in fact, quite the opposite.

Life, like classical music, is full of difficult passages that are conquered as much through endurance and determination as through any particular skill.

Do not let your fire go out ... Do not let the Hero in your soul perish ... Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

Why does life keep teaching me lessons I have no desire to learn?

I think part of a hero construct is overcoming loss, or being abandoned, or having to make your own way in the world.

I think life goes through a cycle of losing and refinding yourself all the time. Everyone has disappointments all the time, some of them pretty small, some of them pretty big.

...the men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame...many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side.

The process of growth is, it seems, the art of falling down. Growth is measured by the gentleness and awareness with which we once again pick ourselves up, the lightness with which we dust ourselves off, the openness with which we continue and take the next unknown step, beyond our edge, beyond our holding, into the remarkable mystery of being.