Top 100 Erich Fromm Quotes
#1. Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.
Erich Fromm
#2. A vast sector of modern advertising ... does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.
Erich Fromm
#3. [T}he sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily.
Erich Fromm
#4. Man can only know the nagation, never the position of ultimate reality.
Erich Fromm
#5. Reality imposes its law on man, laws that he can only escape in dreams or in states of trance - or in insanity.
Erich Fromm
#6. All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual.
Erich Fromm
#7. As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
Erich Fromm
#8. Love is active penetration of the other person, in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody - and I "know" nothing.
Erich Fromm
#9. It is desirable to avoid trivial and evil company altogether - unless one can assert oneself fully, and thus make the other doubt his own position.
Erich Fromm
#10. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a "standing in," not a "falling for." In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.
Erich Fromm
#11. A third way of attaining union lies in creative activity, be it that of the artist, or of the artisan. In any kind of creative work the creating person unites himself with his material, which represents the world outside
Erich Fromm
#12. 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
#13. Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
Erich Fromm
#14. Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.
Erich Fromm
#15. But man is not only made by history - history is made by man.
Erich Fromm
#16. The more man understands and masters nature the less he needs to use religion as a scientific explanation and as a magical device for controlling nature.
Erich Fromm
#17. One discovers answers to problems only when one feels that they are burning and that it is a a matter of life and death to solve them. Is nothing is of burning interest, one's reason and one's critical faculty operate on a low level of activity; it appears then that one lacks the faculty to observe.
Erich Fromm
#18. Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments.
Erich Fromm
#19. Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.
Erich Fromm
#20. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
Erich Fromm
#21. Chronic boredom compensated or uncompensated constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.
Erich Fromm
#22. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
Erich Fromm
#23. Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology.
Erich Fromm
#24. Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm
#25. 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
#26. If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself, too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.
Erich Fromm
#27. I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism.
Erich Fromm
#28. Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity, in the many ways in which such violation is possible.
Erich Fromm
#29. There are many who feel consciously hopeful and unconsciously hopeless, and there are few for whom it is the other way around.
Erich Fromm
#30. There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
Erich Fromm
#31. Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown.
Erich Fromm
#32. The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
Erich Fromm
#33. Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.
Erich Fromm
#34. Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.
Erich Fromm
#35. I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion.
Erich Fromm
#36. If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
Erich Fromm
#37. Human beings had two basic orientations: HAVING and BEING
HAVING: seeks to acquire, posses things even people
BEING: focuses on the experience; exchanging, engaging, sharing with other people
Erich Fromm
#38. Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.
Erich Fromm
#39. Only in the love of those who do not serve a purpose, love begins to unfold.
Erich Fromm
#40. Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers.
Erich Fromm
#41. The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things.
Erich Fromm
#42. We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
Erich Fromm
#43. Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in
themselves.
Erich Fromm
#44. Force is camouflaged by consents; the consent is brought about the methods of mass suggestion.
Erich Fromm
#45. It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group.
Erich Fromm
#46. In the view of the wise, Heaven is man and Earth woman: Earth fosters what Heaven lets fall.
Erich Fromm
#47. The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.
Erich Fromm
#48. I think that the word bored does not get the attention it deserves. We speak of all sorts of terrible things that happen to people, but we rarely speak about one of the most terrible things of all : that is, being bored, being bored alone and, worse than that, being bored together.
Erich Fromm
#49. Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.
Erich Fromm
#50. Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.
Erich Fromm
#51. Will is based on activity, whim on passivity.
Erich Fromm
#52. In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.
Erich Fromm
#53. 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
#54. When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the past - and about the future only as far as that it is death.
Erich Fromm
#55. The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world. The consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle.
Erich Fromm
#56. The newspapers, the magazines, television, and radio produce a commodity: news, from the raw material of events. Only news is salable, and the news media determine which events are news, which are not.
Erich Fromm
#57. Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.
Erich Fromm
#58. Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.
Erich Fromm
#59. That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Erich Fromm
#60. If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?
Nobody but a defeated, deflated, pathetic testimony to a wrong way of living.
Erich Fromm
#61. You have to stop in order to change direction.
Erich Fromm
#62. Lack of concentration makes one tired, while concentration wakes one up.
Erich Fromm
#63. The Jewish and particularly the Christian traditions have stressed the element of sin but have ignored the fact that it is the emancipation from the security of Paradise which is the basis for man's truly human development.
Erich Fromm
#64. Mobilizing the love of life is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead.
Erich Fromm
#65. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.
Erich Fromm
#66. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.
Erich Fromm
#67. 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
#68. The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most.
Erich Fromm
#69. Man's main task is to give birth to himself.
Erich Fromm
#71. The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Erich Fromm
#72. Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have tr
Erich Fromm
#73. The outer chains have simply been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains.
Erich Fromm
#74. There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
Erich Fromm
#75. In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.
Erich Fromm
#76. Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
Erich Fromm
#77. Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
Erich Fromm
#78. Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
Erich Fromm
#79. The absolutely alienated individual worships at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is known.
Erich Fromm
#80. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.
Erich Fromm
#81. Today I, tomorrow you. But this need of help does not mean that the one is helpless, the other powerful. Helplesness is a transitory condition; the ability to stand and walk on one's own feet is the permanent and common one
Erich Fromm
#82. The hoarders, who are anxiously worried about losing something, are, psychologically speaking, the poor impoverished people, regardless of how much they have. Whoever is capable of giving of themselves is rich.
Erich Fromm
#83. Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.
Erich Fromm
#84. Women are equal because they are not different any more.
Erich Fromm
#85. The full humanization of man requires the breakthrough from the possession-centered to the activity-centered orientation, from selfishness and egotism to solidarity and altruism.
Erich Fromm
#86. Productive work, love and thought are possible only if a person can be, when necessary, quiet and alone. To be able to listen to oneself is the necessary condition for relating oneself to others.
Erich Fromm
#87. Freedom is not something we have, there is no such thing as freedom. Freedom is a quality of our personality: we are more or less free to resist pressure, more or less free to do what we want and to be ourselves. Freedom is always a question of increasing freedom one has, or decreasing it.
Erich Fromm
#88. A society whose members are helpless need idols.
Erich Fromm
#89. The doubt itself will not disappear as long as man does not overcome his isolation and as long as his place in the world has not become a meaningful one in terms of his human needs.
Erich Fromm
#90. The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it
Erich Fromm
#91. The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life.
Erich Fromm
#92. Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.
Erich Fromm
#93. Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed, truly human man.
Erich Fromm
#94. It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.
Erich Fromm
#95. One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one's life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.
Erich Fromm
#96. Men are born equal but they are also born different.
Erich Fromm
#97. 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
#98. When people can see a vision and simultaneously recognize what can be done step by step in a concrete way to achieve it, they will begin to feel encouragement and enthusiasm instead of fright.
Erich Fromm
#99. Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their "personality packages" and hope for a fair bargain.
Erich Fromm
#100. The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own
Erich Fromm
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