“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.”

—  Erich Fromm

Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 4 "Problems of Humanistic Ethics"

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of hi…" by Erich Fromm?
Erich Fromm photo
Erich Fromm 119
German social psychologist and psychoanalyst 1900–1980

Related quotes

Erich Fromm photo

“Man’s main task is to give birth to himself.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst
Leo Tolstoy photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Stefan Zweig photo
Albert Schweitzer photo

“The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics

Oscar Wilde photo

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part II

Mahatma Gandhi photo

“A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

In Ethical Religion, (Madras: S. Ganesan, 1922), p. 62 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015002732066?urlappend=%3Bseq=66
1920s
Variant: A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.

Martin Buber photo

“In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Source: Between Man and Man (1965), p. 150

Robert H. Jackson photo

“A confession is wholly and incontestably voluntary only if a guilty person gives himself up to the law and becomes his own accuser.”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 322 U.S. 143, 161 (1944)
Judicial opinions

Gabriel García Márquez photo

Related topics