30 Saving Quotes By Erich Fromm About True Love, Happiness, Freedom, Anxiety And Loneliness

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

We offer you quotes that give life, quotes that answer the most disturbing human questions. The outstanding German philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm reveals to us the secrets of our soul and our worries and helps us find our freedom and our happiness. His thoughts will not leave anyone indifferent. They are like a balm for our wounded hearts.

1. The main life task of a person is to give life to himself, to become what he is potentially. The most important fruit of his efforts is his own personality.
2. We should not explain or account to anyone as long as our actions do not hurt or encroach on others. How many lives have been destroyed by this need to “explain,” which usually means being “understood,” that is, acquitted. Let them judge by your actions, and by them - about your true intentions, but know that a free person must explain something only to himself - to his mind and consciousness - and to those few who have the right to demand an explanation.
3. If I love, I care, that is, I actively participate in the development and happiness of another person, I am not a spectator.
4. The goal of a person is to be himself, and the condition for achieving this goal is to be a person for himself. Not self-denial, not selfishness, but self-love; not a rejection of the individual, but the assertion of one's own human self: these are the true highest values of humanistic ethics.
5. There is no other meaning in life, except what a person gives it, revealing his strength, living fruitfully.
6. If a person can live not in compulsion, not automatically, but spontaneously, then he realizes himself as an active creative person and understands that life has only one meaning - life itself.
7. We are what we have inspired ourselves about ourselves and what others have inspired us about us.
8. Happiness is not a gift from God, but an achievement that a person achieves with his inner fruitfulness.
9. Everything is important for a person, except for his own life and art of living. He exists for anything, but not for himself.
10. A sensitive person is unable to refrain from deep sadness over the inevitable tragedies of life. Both joy and sadness are inevitable experiences of a sensitive person full of life.
11. The unhappy fate of many people is the result of a choice they did not make. They are neither alive nor dead. Life turns out to be a burden, an invaluable occupation, and deeds are only a means of protection from the torment of being in the kingdom of shadows.
12. The concept of "being alive" is not a static concept, but a dynamic one. Existence is the same as the disclosure of the specific forces of the organism. The actualization of potential forces is an innate property of all organisms. Therefore, the disclosure of human potentials according to the laws of his nature should be considered as the goal of human life.
13. Compassion and experience presupposes that I experience in myself what the other person has experienced, and, therefore, in this experience he and I are one. All knowledge about another person is valid insofar as it is based on my experience of what he is experiencing.
14. I am sure that no one can “save” their neighbor by making a choice for him. All that one person can help another is to reveal to him truthfully and with love, but without sentimentality and illusion, the existence of an alternative.
15. Life poses a paradoxical task for a person: on the one hand, to realize his individuality, and on the other, to surpass it and come to the experience of universality. Only through all-round development can a person rise above his Self.
16. If children's love comes from the principle: "I love because I love," then mature love comes from the principle: "I love because I love." Immature love screams, "I love you because I need you!" Mature love thinks, "I need you because I love you."
17. Selfless obsession with each other is not a proof of the power of love, but only evidence of the immensity of the loneliness that preceded it.
18. If a person experiences love according to the principle of possession, then this means that he seeks to deprive the object of his "love" of freedom and to keep it under control. Such love does not bestow life, but suppresses, destroys, strangles, kills it.
19. Most people believe that love depends on an object, not on one's own ability to love. They are even convinced that since they do not love anyone other than their "beloved" person, this proves the power of their love. This is where the delusion manifests itself - an orientation toward an object. This is similar to the state of a person who wants to paint, but instead of learning to paint, he insists that he just has to find a decent nature: when this happens, he will paint beautifully, and it will happen by itself. But if I really love some person, I love all people, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to someone “I love you”, I should be able to say “I love everything in you”, “I love the whole world thanks to you, I love myself in you”.
20. The character of the child is a cast of the character of the parents; it develops in response to their character.
21. If a person is capable of fully loving, then he loves himself; if he is able to love only others, he cannot love at all.
22. It is generally accepted that falling in love is already the pinnacle of love, while in fact it is the beginning and only the possibility of finding love. It is believed that this is the result of the mysterious and attraction of two people to each other, an event that happens by itself. Yes, loneliness and sexual desires make falling in love easy, and there is nothing mysterious here, but this is the success that leaves as quickly as it came. They do not become loved by chance; your own ability to love makes you love in the same way that being interested makes a person interesting.
23. A person who cannot create wants to destroy.
24. Oddly enough, but the ability to be alone is a condition of the ability to love.
25. As important as avoiding idle talk, it is just as important to avoid bad society. By "bad society" I mean not only perverse people - their society should be avoided because their influence is oppressive and pernicious. I mean also the "zombie" society, whose soul is dead, although the body is alive; people with empty thoughts and words, people who do not speak, but chat, do not think, but express common opinions.
26. In a loved one, one must find oneself, and not lose oneself in him.
27. If things could talk, then the question "Who are you?" a typewriter would say, "I am a typewriter," a car would say, "I am a car," or more specifically, I am a Ford or a Buick or a Cadillac. If you ask a person who he is, he answers: "I am a manufacturer", "I am an employee", "I am a doctor" or "I am a married man" or "I am a father of two children", and his answer will mean almost the same as what the answer of the saying thing would mean.
28. If other people don't understand our behavior - so what? Their desire for us to do only as they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If that means being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Most of all, they are offended by our freedom and our courage to be ourselves.
29. Our moral problem is man's indifference to himself.
30. Man is the center and purpose of his life. The development of one's personality, the realization of all internal potential is the highest goal, which simply cannot change or depend on other supposedly higher goals.