top of page
"Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Introspection quotes

"I'm curious about everyone, hungry for everything, greedy for all ideas. My awareness that not everything can be seen, not everything read and not everything thought torments me like the loss of ..... But I don't see with fixed attention, I don't read with great care, and I don't think with continuity. I'm an ardent and inconsequential dilettante in everything. My soul is too weak to sustain the force of its own enthusiasm. Made out of ruins of the unfinished, I'm definable as a landscape of resignations."

"Lifting her lovely and longing face towards the inaudible chant of the sun, she drifted through her time, through space, through the concatenate cells of her unfolding self. Where to now, Abbzug? You're twenty-eight and a half years old, Abbzug."

"After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him."

"I saw myself in the mirror, and from my expression I had a shocking intimation of the rift between my body and my soul. Whereas my face was drained by defeat and shock, inside my head was another universe: I now understood as an elemental fact of life that while I was here, inside my body was a soul, a meaning, that all things were made of desire, touch, and love, that what I was suffering was composed of the same elements."

"I imagine some people, like some toys, are born defective - which I suppose makes us all broken toys, don't you think?"

"You can find the answers to the most complicated questions of life from your deepest self. Pay attention and listen. Your inner self has to say something to you. Listen to that eternal entity within, and you shall discover the way through which you'll reach your goal."

"I Feel like a prison holding myself, bounded by the judgements of people I care and chained by the rules of the society I live in. If I would let the person who speaks inside me out, he would tell you a different story than what you have seen all these years. Sometimes I see myself crying, screaming and trying to tear myself into pieces when I stand in front of the mirror so that I could finally be free from myself. But the demons I have created inside me to guard beats me down and laughs at me, watching me bleed."

"And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?"If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists."

"Seeing the faults of others is indeed an echo of our own fault, the biggest fault is our own fault. That is known as the mad ego."
Explore more quotes by Erich Fromm

"There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue."

"It is the task of the "science of man" to arrive eventually at a correct description of what deserves to be called human nature. What has often been called "human nature" is but one of its many manifestations - and often a pathological one - and the function of such mistaken definition usually has been to defend a particular type of society as being the necessary one."

"An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and "belonging." On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances present."

"The field of human relations in Freud's sense is similar to the market-it is an exchange of satisfaction of biologically given needs, in which the relationship to the other individual is always a means to an end but never an end in itself."

"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."
bottom of page