Erich Fromm Quotes & Sayings

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

Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them. — Erich Fromm

The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced
by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix. — Erich Fromm

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

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. — Erich Fromm

It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides. — Erich Fromm

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

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as
drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. — 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

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

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

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

The field of human relations in Freud's sense is similar to the market - it is an exchange of satisfaction of biologically given needs, in which the relationship to the other individual is always a means to an end but never an end in itself. — Erich Fromm

We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. — Erich Fromm

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint. — Erich Fromm

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

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. — Erich Fromm

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

If man were infinitely malleable, there would have been nor revolutions; there would have been no change because a culture would have succeeded in making man submit to its patterns without resistance. But man, being only relatively malleable, has always reacted with protest against conditions which made the disequilibrium between the social order and his human needs too drastic or unbearable. The attempt to reduce this disequilibrium and the need to establish a more acceptable and desirable solution is at the very core of the dynamism of the evolution of man in history. Man's protest arose not only because of material suffering; specifically human needs ... are an equally strong motivation for revolution and the dynamics of change. — Erich Fromm

Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. — Erich Fromm

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

I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way. — Erich Fromm

Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort. — Erich Fromm

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

The anxiety engendered by confronting the abyss of nothingness [of the loss of self] is more terrifying than the tortures of hell. In the vision of hell, I am punished and tortured - In the vision of nothingness I am driven to the border of madness - because I cannot say 'I' any more. — Erich Fromm

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

Man can attempt to become one with the world by submission to a person, to a group, to an institution, to God. In this way, he transcends the separateness of his individual existence by becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself, and experiences his identity in connection with the power to which he has submitted. — Erich Fromm

Frequently, and not only in the popular usage, sadomasochism is confounded with
love. Masochistic phenomena, especially, are looked upon as expressions of love.
An attitude of complete self-denial for the sake of another person and the
surrender of one's own rights and claims to another person have been praised as
examples of "great love". It seems that there is no better proof for "love" than
sacrifice and the readiness to give oneself up for the sake of the beloved person.
Actually, in these cases, "love" is essentially a masochistic yearning and rooted in the symbiotic need of the person involved. — 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

Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. — Erich Fromm

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

There is no word in our language which has been so much misused and prostituted as the word love. It has been preached by those who were ready to condone every cruelty if it served their purpose; it has been used as a disguise under which to force people into sacrificing their own happiness, into submitting their whole self to those who profited from this surrender. [ ... ] It has been made so empty that for many people love may mean no more than that two people have lived together for twenty years just without fighting more often than once a week. — Erich Fromm

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

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

It is the task of the "science of man" to arrive eventually at a correct description of what deserves to be called human nature. What has often been called "human nature" is but one of its many manifestations - and often a pathological one - and the function of such mistaken definition usually has been to defend a particular type of society as being the necessary one. — Erich Fromm

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

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

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

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

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

Man's happiness today consists in "having fun." Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and "taking in" commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies - all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones - and the eternally disappointed ones. — Erich Fromm

The confusion between temperament and character has had serious consequences for ethical theory. Preferences with regard to differences in temperament are mere matters of subjective taste.
But differences in character are ethically of the most fundamental importance. — Erich Fromm

We may know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts we make, we do not know ourselves. We know our fellowman, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellowman is not a thing. The further we reach into the depths of our being, on someone else's being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us. — Erich Fromm

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

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our
insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult ... Just as love for one
individual which excludes the love for others is not love,
love for one's country which is not part of one's love
for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship. — Erich Fromm

But any explanation which analyzes one sector to the exclusion of all others is unbalanced, and thus wrong. The socio-economic, spiritual and psychological explanations look at the same phenomena from different aspects, and the very task of a theoretical analysis is to see how these different aspects are interrelated, and how they interact. — Erich Fromm

Without a map of our natural and social world - a picture of the world and of one's place in it that is structured and has inner cohesion - human beings would be confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently, for there would be no way of orienting oneself, of finding a fixed point that permits one to organize all the impressions that impinge upon each individual. [ ... ] Even if the map is wrong, it fulfills its psychological function. But the map has never been entirely wrong - nor has it ever been entirely right. It has always been enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenomena to serve the purpose of living. — Erich Fromm

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

You have to stop to change direction. — Erich Fromm

A society whose members are helpless need idols. — Erich Fromm

There is only one passion which satisfies man's need to unite himself with the world, and to acquire at the same time a sense of integrity and individuality, and this is love. Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self. It is an experience of sharing, of communion, which permits the full unfolding of one's own inner activity. The experience of love does away with the necessity of illusions. There is no need to inflate the image of the other person, or of myself, since the reality of active sharing and loving permits me to transcend my individualized existence, and at the same time to experience myself as the bearer of the active powers which constitute the act of loving. What — Erich Fromm

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved , rather than that of loving , of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable. In pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. One, which is especially used by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of one's position permits. Another, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating one's body, dress, etc ... Many of the ways to make oneself lovable are the same as those used to make oneself successful, to 'win friends and influence people'. As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal. — Erich Fromm

Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity, in the many ways in which such violation is possible. — Erich Fromm

FORTITUDE IS THE CAPACITY TO SAY NO WHEN THE WORLD WANTS TO HEAR 'YES' — Erich Fromm

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

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

Men are born equal but they are also born different. — Erich Fromm

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

Man's nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history. — Erich Fromm

If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either. — Erich Fromm

In other words, ideas can become powerful forces, but only to the extent to which they are answers to specific human needs prominent in a given social character. — Erich Fromm

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

Society, and the family as its psycho social agent, has to solve a difficult problem: How to break a person's will without his being aware of it? Yet by a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology, it solves this task by and large so well that most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated. — Erich Fromm

Another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals, which they serve. — Erich Fromm

I wonder sometimes whether a person has to become insane these days in order to feel certain things. Lessing once said, Who doesn't become insane over certain things, has no sanity to lose, — 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

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

Mental health cannot be defined in terms of the "adjustment" of the individual to his society, but, on the other hand, that it must be defined in terms of the society to the needs of man, of its role in furthering or hindering the development of mental health. Whether or not the individual is healthy, is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society. — Erich Fromm

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

Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. — 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

Faith in life, in oneself, in others must be built on the hard rock of realism; that is to say, on the capacity to see evil where it is, to see swindle, destructiveness, and selfishness not only when they are obvious but in their many disguises and rationalizations. Indeed, faith, love, and hope must go together with such a passion for seeing reality in all its nakedness that the outsider would be prone to call the attitude 'cynicism.' And cynical it is, when we mean by it the refusal to be taken in by the sweet and plausible lies that cover almost everything that is said and believed. But this kind of cynicism is not cynicism; it is uncompromisingly critical, a refusal to play the game in a system of deception. — Erich Fromm

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self. — Erich Fromm

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

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

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

[S]ex no longer frightens people; it can no longer be used to develop a sense of guilt, and thereby to force submission. — Erich Fromm

Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours. — Erich Fromm

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

The problem of knowing man is parallel to the religious problem of knowing God. In conventional Western theology the attempt is made to know God by thought, to make statements about God. It is assumed that I can know God in my thought. In mysticism, which is the consequent outcome of monotheism, the attempt is given up to know God by thought, and it is replaced by the experience of union with God in which there is no more room - and no need - for knowledge about God. — Erich Fromm

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

The greater the sense of powerlessness and the greater lack of authentic will, the more grows either submission or an obsessional desire for satisfaction of one's whims and the insistence on arbitrariness. — Erich Fromm

When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak. — Erich Fromm

The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present. — Erich Fromm

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

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

Both the mentally healthy and the neurotic are driven by the need to find an answer [to the problem of human existence], the only difference being that one answer corresponds more to the total needs of man, and hence is more conducive to the unfolding of his powers and to his happiness than the other. All cultures provide for a patterned system in which certain solutions are predominant, hence certain strivings and satisfactions ... The deviate from the cultural pattern is just as much in search of an answer as his more well-adjusted brother. His answer may be better or worse than the one given by his culture - it is always another answer to the same fundamental question raised by human existence. In this sense all cultures are religious and every neurosis is a private form of religion, provided we mean by religion an attempt to answer the problem of human existence. — Erich Fromm

A new question has arisen in modern man's mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living ... No sensible answer can be given to the question ... because the question does not make any sense. — Erich Fromm

The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man. — Erich Fromm

The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity, because the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such a radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling of separation disappears - because the world outside, from which one is separated, has disappeared. — Erich Fromm

We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigour, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self; to have faith in this self and in life. — Erich Fromm

Man today is fascinated by the possibility of buying, more, better, and especially, new things. He is consumption hungry ... To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite secondary. Modern man, if the dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world ... — Erich Fromm

Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie - not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one's voice, one's gesture, one's eyes, one's facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only "people," but the very people we trusted most - our parents, teachers, leaders. — Erich Fromm

TO ACCEPT THE DIFFICULTIES,SETBACKS AND TRAGEDIES OF LIFE AS A CHALLENGE WHICH TO OVERCOME MAKES US STRONGER, RATHER THAN AS SOMETHING THAT SHOULD NOT HAPPEN TO US REQUIRES FAITH AND COURAGE — Erich Fromm

The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life. — Erich Fromm

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

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

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

We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree to which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and love. — Erich Fromm

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