Erich Fromm Quotes

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I've had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

If you've done what you need to do, you need to go bury yourself, because what else are you going to do? I think that that's where life stops.

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.

Every human being is under construction from conception to death.

Perhaps nobody ever accomplishes all that he feels lies in him to do; but nearly every one who tries his power touches the walls of his being.

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

What is life about? Two things: love and death.

I think the saddest thing in the world will be for people who face their death and realize they never lived. That won't be me.

How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not to understand it!

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

It is death that is the guide of our life, and our life has no goal but death.

Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out.

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

Happens to everybody. Horses, dogs, men. Nobody gets out of life alive.

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever 'completing a life' means.