top of page
"That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Psychology quotes

"Nothing humbles a beautiful woman better than not being wanted by a man whose girlfriend or wife is ugly (or not as beautiful as she is)."

"Indoctrination is not just demeaning to the human conscience, it is lethal for the flourishing psychology of the hungry, young mind."

"Shame lies. All the time. About everything. Don't believe your shame."

"I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."

"Nothing will ever be solved if we wallow in the darkness of denial."

"If you really do put a small value upon yourself rest assured that the world will not raise your price."

"When the river of emotions bursts its banks and expectations go over the edges of reality, the brain creates hallucinations. Ringxiety-stricken people feel illusive vibrating alerts and hear phantom phone rings, since absence of ringing generates scaring emptiness and destroys their self-esteem. ['Kein Schwein ruft mich an']"

"Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other."

"[If a man] postpone[s] any open acknowledgement... that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends [are] based... he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He will assume, at first only by his manner, but presently by his words, all sorts of cynical and sceptical attitudes which are not really his. But... they may become his. All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be."

"I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling."
Explore more quotes by Erich Fromm

"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."

"Indeed, with the experience of self disappears the experience of identity - and when this happens, man could become insane if he did not save himself by acquiring a secondary sense of self; he does that by experiencing himself as being approved of, worthwhile, successful, useful - briefly, as a salable commodity which is he because he is looked upon by others as an entity, not unique but fitting into one of the current patterns."

"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."

"Modern man thinks he loses something-time-when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains- except kill it."

"The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life."

"Millions are impressed by the victories of power and take it for the sign of strength. To be sure, power over people is an expression of superior strength in a purely material sense. If I have the power over another person to kill him, I am "stronger" than he is. But in a psychological sense, the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of inability of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking."
bottom of page