Erich Fromm Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Erich Fromm on Wise Famous Quotes.
The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology.
The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense of life.
The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
The absolutely alienated individual worships at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is known.
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.
If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love.
The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy.
The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.
The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.
To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death.
Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life
When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.
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
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
There are many who feel consciously hopeful and unconsciously hopeless, and there are few for whom it is the other way around.
Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.
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.
Nobody but a defeated, deflated, pathetic testimony to a wrong way of living.
[S]ex no longer frightens people; it can no longer be used to develop a sense of guilt, and thereby to force submission.
If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue - and not a vice - to love myself, since I am a human being too.
Reality imposes its law on man, laws that he can only escape in dreams or in states of trance - or in insanity.
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.
We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.
The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most.
While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements.
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
God explains to Jonah that the essence of love is to "labor" for something and "to make something grow,
There is undoubtedly a difference between people who manipulate other people and people who create things.
If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself, too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.
I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If
The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.
All men are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual.
Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.
Looking for the next thing to do or the newest gadget to use is only a means of protecting oneself from being close to oneself or to another person.
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.
In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.
There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one's own wishes with existing reality.
It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group.
The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things.
Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.
The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.