Erich Fromm
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Man's main task is to give birth to himself.
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Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
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Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.
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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.
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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.
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Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.
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Immature love says, "I love you because I need you." Mature love says, "I need you because I love you."
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There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives to his life by the unfolding of his powers.
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There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding of his powers.
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Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
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The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
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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.
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Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.
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Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'
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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.
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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.