Erich Fromm (1900-1980)

Erich Seligmann Fromm was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States. He was one of the founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Quotes

Man's main task is to give birth to himself.
Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.
That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.
The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.

Civilization
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.
Immature love says, "I love you because I need you." Mature love says, "I need you because I love you."
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives to his life by the unfolding of his powers.
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding of his powers.
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
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.
Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'

Love
To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person.

Love
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.

Love