Zitat des Tages von Erich Fromm:
The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.
Authority is not a quality one person 'has', in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Man always dies before he is fully born.
As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
