The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive. The Denial of Death (1973)
Beyond a given point man is not helped by more "knowing", but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. The Denial of Death (1973)
...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.