Erich Fromm famous quotes

There is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves. And there is nothing which brings us greater joy and happiness than to think, feel, and say what is ours.
-- Erich Fromm

#Thinking #Joy #Ashamed

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
-- Erich Fromm

#Letting Go #Spiritual #Courage

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
-- Erich Fromm

#Effort #Greed #Needs

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Life #Philosophical

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
-- Erich Fromm

#Block #Power #Men

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself.
-- Erich Fromm

#Men #Giving #Tasks

I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the "growth" of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence. Love is a productive orientation for which it is essential that there be present at the same time: concern, responsibility, and respect for and knowledge of the object of the union.
-- Erich Fromm

#Life #Integrity #Believe

Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.
-- Erich Fromm

#Life #Love Is #Littles

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Family #Marriage

Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be. Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.
-- Erich Fromm

#Eye #Journey #Long

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Life #Dream

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
-- Erich Fromm

#Worry #Anxiety #Meaning Of Life

Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Romantic #Judging

If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being 'asocial' or 'irrational' in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.
-- Erich Fromm

#Hurt #Eye #Long

Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Lying #Power

Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Romantic #Faith

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
-- Erich Fromm

#Self Esteem

If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.
-- Erich Fromm

#Christian #Mean #Reflection

...in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving. Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which "only" profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend energy on?
-- Erich Fromm

#Art #Luxury #Soul

Authority is not a quality one person 'has,' in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.
-- Erich Fromm

#Quality #Looks #Authority

To take the difficulties, setbacks and sorrows of life as a challenge to overcome makes us stronger, rather than unjust punishment which should not happen to us, requires faith and courage.
-- Erich Fromm

#Thinking #Punishment #Challenges

I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.
-- Erich Fromm

#Art #Creativity #Practice

The two most far-reaching critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and Freud. Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for the liberation of man, even though Marx's concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud's.
-- Erich Fromm

#Moving #Men #Two

Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.
-- Erich Fromm

#Men #Psychology #Tools

A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.
-- Erich Fromm

#Dream #Soul #Looks

We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams... we are also more inteligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake.
-- Erich Fromm

#Dream #Judgment #Awake

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
-- Erich Fromm

#Lust #Weakness #Lust For Power

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.
-- Erich Fromm

#Real #Love Is #Objectivity

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness
-- Erich Fromm

#Grief #Grieving #Bereavement

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.
-- Erich Fromm

#Strong #Decision #Feelings

Greedhas no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.
-- Erich Fromm

#Loneliness #Boredom #Greed

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 whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Attitude #Character

Man is the only animal that can be bored.
-- Erich Fromm

#Animal #Men #Boredom

If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it.
-- Erich Fromm

#Brother #Liberty #Want

Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.
-- Erich Fromm

#Animal #Men #May

Mother's love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there it is as if all the beauty had gone out of life.
-- Erich Fromm

#Mom #Mother #Blessing

What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it requires the capacity to be puzzled. Children still have the capacity to be puzzled.
-- Erich Fromm

#Children #Attitude #Creative

Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.
-- Erich Fromm

#Creativity #Acceptance #Self

Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience-- yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim-- except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.
-- Erich Fromm

#Moving #Independent #Men

Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities and the connection that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable.
-- Erich Fromm

#Children #Opposites #Growth

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
-- Erich Fromm

#Fear #Thinking #Religion

Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.
-- Erich Fromm

#Time #Learning #Knowledge

That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
-- Erich Fromm

#People #Doe #Sanity

To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Pain #Disappointment

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
-- Erich Fromm

#Hope #Mean #Birth

Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.
-- Erich Fromm

#Passion #Thinking #Two

To be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this, or that - there is always a fear that love could disappear.
-- Erich Fromm

#Doubt #Want #Merit

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
-- Erich Fromm

#Anger #Future #Past

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
-- Erich Fromm

#Want #Affluent

Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him.
-- Erich Fromm

#Mean #Judging #Understanding

The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
-- Erich Fromm

#Business #Inner Peace #Insecurity

As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
-- Erich Fromm

#Ladders #Injustice #Mask

We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.
-- Erich Fromm

#Dream #Sleep #Understanding

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
-- Erich Fromm

#Integrity #Love You #Love Is

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
-- Erich Fromm

#Life #Creativity #Mean

A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet 'for sale', who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society.
-- Erich Fromm

#Lonely #Feelings #Suffering

To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.
-- Erich Fromm

#Knowing Who You Are #Birth #Born

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

#Life #Birthday #Character

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
-- Erich Fromm

#Sympathy #Death #Wise

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Life #Attachment

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
-- Erich Fromm

#Faith #Confidence #Able

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
-- Erich Fromm

#Life #Animal #Men

The only way of full knowledge lies in the act of love; this act transcends thought, it transcends words. It is the daring plunge into the experience of union. To love somebody is not just a strong feeling-it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Strong #Lying

Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.
-- Erich Fromm

#Lying #Expression #Giving

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Family #Happiness

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Men #World

All great art is by its very essence in conflict with the society with which it exists. It expresses the truth about the existence regardless of whether this truth serves or hinders the survival purpose of a given society. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
-- Erich Fromm

#Art #Reality #Men

Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Life #Two

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
-- Erich Fromm

#Selfish #Love You #Greed

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.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Hope #Expectations

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.
-- Erich Fromm

#Beauty #Beautiful #Men

In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child's separation.
-- Erich Fromm

#Mother #Children #Two

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found- in himself.
-- Erich Fromm

#Believe #Past #Clouds

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
-- Erich Fromm

#Art #Creation #Capacity

That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.
-- Erich Fromm

#Life #Hate #Men

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.
-- Erich Fromm

#Mom #Mother #Children

I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity.
-- Erich Fromm

#Believe #Humanity #Development

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
-- Erich Fromm

#Motivational #Freedom #Real

We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
-- Erich Fromm

#History #Growth #Connections

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Good Morning #Dream

To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge.
-- Erich Fromm

#School #Responsibility #Knowing

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
-- Erich Fromm

#Errors #People #Vices

Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.
-- Erich Fromm

#Civilization #Doubt #May

Human history began with an act of disobedience and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience
-- Erich Fromm

#Obedience #Unlikely #Humans

Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.
-- Erich Fromm

#Art #Effort

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.
-- Erich Fromm

#Powerful #Men #World

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.
-- Erich Fromm

#Animal #Intelligent #Men

There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
-- Erich Fromm

#Evil #Giving #Comfort

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.
-- Erich Fromm

#Motivation #Real #Passion

The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.
-- Erich Fromm

#Giving #Birth #Individual

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
-- Erich Fromm

#Successful #Political #Nerd

Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
-- Erich Fromm

#Ability To Love #Ability

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

#Sadness #Compassion #Curiosity

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Smile #Two

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.
-- Erich Fromm

#Dream #Communication #Missing

True love is like a pair of socks: you gotta have two and they've gotta match.
-- Erich Fromm

#Love Is #Two #Secret Love

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
-- Erich Fromm

#Love #Family #Happiness

Love is an act of faith.
-- Erich Fromm

#Romantic #Faith #Sweet

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.
-- Erich Fromm

#Practice #Discipline #Feelings

Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason.
-- Erich Fromm

#Freedom #Men #Liberty