The majority of well adapted individuals have lost their own self at an early age and replaced it completely by a social self offered to them by society. They have no neurotic conflicts because they themselves… have disappeared.

Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice… Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the world as a whole, not toward one object of love... Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence… 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.

Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity.

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

Understanding a person does not mean condoning.

-- Erich Fromm, German social psychologist & philosopher, 1900 - 1980