Erich Fromm Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm Quotes & Sayings

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Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine. — Erich Fromm

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

The mature response to the problem of existence is love. — Erich Fromm

I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored. — Erich Fromm

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

On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man's need for collective art and ritual. — Erich Fromm

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

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

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

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

Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled, to concentrate, to accept conflict and tension, to be born every day, to feel a sense of self. — Erich Fromm

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

The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things. — Erich Fromm

When people can't handle God any more, they turn to religion. — Erich Fromm

Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness. — Erich Fromm

Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one's own wishes with existing reality. — Erich Fromm

Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself. — Erich Fromm

Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings. — Erich Fromm

Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their "personality packages" and hope for a fair bargain. — Erich Fromm

Death is never sweet, not even if it is suffered for the highest ideal. — Erich Fromm

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. — Erich Fromm

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

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines. — Erich Fromm

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

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture. — Erich Fromm

Education is helping the child realise his potentialities. — Erich Fromm

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born. — Erich Fromm

To know and yet [think] we do not know is the highest [attainment]; not to know [and yet think] we do know is a disease. — Erich Fromm

Will is based on activity, whim on passivity. — Erich Fromm

Capitalism puts things (capital) higher than life (labor). Power follows from possession, not from activity. — Erich Fromm

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

The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life. — Erich Fromm

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

[T]he need for speed and newness, which can only be satisfied by consumerism, reflects restlessness, the inner flight from oneself. — Erich Fromm

Love is an act of faith. — Erich Fromm

In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation. — Erich Fromm

To be concentrated means to live fully in the present. — Erich Fromm

Aliveness always makes a beautiful. — Erich Fromm

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

Mother's love always peace as it not to be acquired nor deserved. — Erich Fromm

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

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

Creativity is the ability to see and to respond. — Erich Fromm

The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. — Erich Fromm

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

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

I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion. — Erich Fromm

Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain. — Erich Fromm

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

Freedom is the fundamental condition for any growth. — Erich Fromm

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

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

It is time to cease to argue about God , and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry. — Erich Fromm

Man can only know the nagation, never the position of ultimate reality. — Erich Fromm

Mother is the home we come from.
She is nature, soil, ocean. — Erich Fromm

But man is not only made by history - history is made by man. — Erich Fromm

The ultimate choice for a man, in as much as he is given to transcend himself, is to create or destroy, to love or to hate. — Erich Fromm

One can hardly overestimate people's need to talk about themselves and to be listened to. — Erich Fromm

The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own — Erich Fromm

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. — Erich Fromm

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. — Erich Fromm

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

There is only one reality: the act of feeling ourselves in the process of making choices. — Erich Fromm

God explains to Jonah that the essence of love is to "labor" for something and "to make something grow, — Erich Fromm

The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it — Erich Fromm

There is undoubtedly a difference between people who manipulate other people and people who create things. — Erich Fromm

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

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 — Erich Fromm

The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event. — Erich Fromm

Women are equal because they are not different any more. — Erich Fromm

Psychologist Erich Fromm coined the term ["biophilia"] in 1964 as a way of describing the innate attraction to processes of life and growth. — Adam Leith Gollner

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. — Erich Fromm

Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers. — Erich Fromm

[W]hat a person considers the minimal necessities depends as much on his character as it depends on his actual possessions. — Erich Fromm

Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built. — Erich Fromm

In the view of the wise, Heaven is man and Earth woman: Earth fosters what Heaven lets fall. — Erich Fromm

Force is camouflaged by consents; the consent is brought about the methods of mass suggestion. — Erich Fromm

The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love — Erich Fromm

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

Mobilizing the love of life is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead. — Erich Fromm

The basic for any approach to self-transformation is an ever-increasing awareness of reality and the shedding of illusions. — Erich Fromm

Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. — Erich Fromm

Reality imposes its law on man, laws that he can only escape in dreams or in states of trance - or in insanity. — Erich Fromm

The value judgments we make determine our actions, and upon their validity rests our mental health and happiness. — Erich Fromm

It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it. — Erich Fromm

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

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

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist. — Erich Fromm

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

We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization. — Erich Fromm

I cannot know who I am, because I don't know which part of me is not me. — Erich Fromm

If i am what i have, and i lose what i have, who then am i? — Erich Fromm

Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream. — Erich Fromm

Love is a power which produces love. — Erich Fromm

The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born. — Erich Fromm

The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most. — Erich Fromm

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

While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements. — Erich Fromm

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

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