Erich Fromm — Quote from The Art of Loving
“The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love, is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.”
The Art of Loving (1956)
Concepts: loneliness, alienation, love
Resonant Quotes
- “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of comm...” — bell hooks, All About Love hooks provides the precise remedy for Fromm's diagnosis, with her emphasis on communion as healing directly addressin...
- “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. To be healed we must come...” — bell hooks, All About Love hooks' vision of communal healing directly addresses Fromm's diagnosis that separation without love generates shame a...
- “The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quie...” — Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death Kierkegaard's insight about the quiet loss of selfhood deepens Fromm's analysis by suggesting that the shame and anxi...
- “To catch a glimmer of oneself in the other — this is the deepest joy the huma...” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity Both philosophers identify human connection as the antidote to existential isolation, with Beauvoir's 'glimmer of one...
- “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.” — Albert Camus, The Stranger Camus finds peace in accepting cosmic indifference while Fromm identifies this very separation and disconnection as t...
- “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to s...” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet Both authors locate the source of human suffering in separation and fear, but Rilke transforms Fromm's clinical obser...
- “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happeni...” — Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis Kafka's radical incommunicability exemplifies the extreme form of the separation anxiety that Fromm identifies, showi...
- “The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one ...” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex Both identify barriers to love's capacity for healing separation—Fromm sees separation as the fundamental wound that ...