1
We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent – people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.Erich Fromm
2
The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life.Erich Fromm
3
If the religious system does not correspond to the prevalent social character, if it conflicts with the social practice of life, it is only an ideology.Erich Fromm
4
They have their big, ever-changing egos, but none has a self, a core, a sense of identity.Erich Fromm
5
Those who unconsciously despair yet put on the mask of optimism are not necessarily wise. But those who have not given up hope can succeed only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all illusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties.Erich Fromm
6
The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other.Erich Fromm
7
But a map is not enough as a guide for action; we also need a goal that tells us where to go. Animals have no such problems. Their instincts provide them with a map as well as with goals. But lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits us to think of many directions in which we can go, we need an object of total devotion, a focal point for all our strivings and the basis for all our effective - not only our proclaimed - values. We need such an object of devotion in order to integrate our energies in one direction, to transcend our isolated existence, with all its doubts and insecurities, and to answer our need for a meaning of life.Erich Fromm