Erich Fromm Two Quotations

If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love.

The two most far-reaching critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and Freud. Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for the liberation of man, even though Marx's concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud's.

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.

Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.

Basically, there can only be two answers. One is to overcome separateness and find unity by regression to the state of unity which existed before awareness ever arose, that is, before man was born. The other answer is to be fully born, to develop one's awareness, one's reason, one's capacity to love to such a point that one transcends one's own egocentric involvement, and arrives at a new harmony, at a new oneness with the world.

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child's separation.

True love is like a pair of socks: you gotta have two and they've gotta match.