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

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

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 absolutely alienated individual worships at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is known. — Erich Fromm

Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation. — Erich Fromm

One of the most obvious explanations is that the leaders undertake many actions that make it possible for them to pretend they are doing something effective to avoid a catastrophe: endless conferences, resolutions, disarmament talks, all give the impression that the problems are recognized and something is being done to resolve them. — Erich Fromm

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

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

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

As long as one was an integral part of that world, unaware of the possibilities and responsibilities of individual action, one did not need to be afraid of it. When one has become an individual , one stands alone and faces the world in all its perilous and overpowering aspects. — 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

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

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

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

We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what "he" thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally - that is, for himself - which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts. — Erich Fromm

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

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

Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure. — Erich Fromm

How should a man caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and of separateness? — Erich Fromm

Man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way; but only almost. — Erich Fromm

In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God's existence, God's justice, God's love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living. — Erich Fromm

If there is no evidence that sport lowers aggression, at the same time it should be said that there is also no evidence that sport is motivated by aggression. — 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

What kind of men, then, does our society need? What is the "social character" suited to twentieth century Capitalism? It needs men who co-operate smoothly in large groups; who want to consume more and more, and whose tasks are standardized and can easily be 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, to fit into the social machine without friction. — Erich Fromm

The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy. — Erich Fromm

Man's main task is to give birth to himself. — Erich Fromm

In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. "Having faith" in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change. — 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

If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune. — 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

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I? — 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

The intensity and excitement which accompanies moments of infatuation is frequently relative to the degree of loneliness and isolation which has been previously experienced. — Erich Fromm

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality. — Erich Fromm

The fact that millions of people take part in a delusion doesn't make it sane. — Erich Fromm

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. — Erich Fromm

Escape from Freedom attempts to show, modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton. — Erich Fromm

Man always dies before he is fully born. — Erich Fromm

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

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

It is the thesis of this book that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of his freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man. — Erich Fromm

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

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

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

But not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man. — Erich Fromm

Nature is the great power we have to submit to, but living beings are the ones we should dominate. — 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

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

Beyond the element of giving, the active characteristic of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsability, respect and knowledge — Erich Fromm

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

Having lost religious faith and the humanistic values bound up with it, he [man] concentrated on technical and material values and lost the capacity for deep emotional experiences, for the joy and sadness that accompany them. — Erich Fromm

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

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

The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge. — Erich Fromm

Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?..Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission? — Erich Fromm

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

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

The capacity to see and - equally so - blindness are not divisible. The critical faculty of the human mind is one: To believe one can be seeing internally but blind as far as the outside world is concerned is like saying that the light of a candle gives light only in one direction and not in all. The light of the candle is reason's capacity for critical, penetrating, uncovering thought. — 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

Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought. — Erich Fromm

People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love , power , fame , revenge . Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent. — Erich Fromm

Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution. — Erich Fromm

In studying the psychological significance of a religious or political doctrine, we must first bear in mind that the psychological analysis does not imply a judgement concerning the truth of the doctrine one analyzes. This latter question can be decided only in terms of the logical structure of the problem itself. — Erich Fromm

The task of critique is not to denounce the ideals, but to show their transformation into ideologies, and to challenge the ideology in the name of the betrayed ideal — Erich Fromm

Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange ... For the man an attractive girl - and for the woman an attractive man - are the prizes they are after. 'attractive' usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally ... Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. — Erich Fromm

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

Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself. — Erich Fromm

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

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

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

He gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness - of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. — Erich Fromm

To some people return to religion is the answer, not as an act of faith but in order to escape an intolerable doubt; they make this decision not out of devotion but in search of security. — Erich Fromm

This popular picture of Marx's 'materialism' - his anti-spiritual tendency, his wish for uniformity and subordination - is utterly false. Marx's aim was that of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains of economic determination, of restituting him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature. Marx's philosophy was, in secular, nontheistic language, a new and radical step forward in the tradition of prophetic Messianism; it was aimed at the full realization of individualism, the very aim which has guided Western thinking from the Renaissance and the Reformation far into the nineteenth century. — 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

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

Friendliness, cheerfulness, and everything that a smile is supposed to express, become automatic responses which one turns on and off like an electric switch. — Erich Fromm

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

Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either "have" or "have not." In fact, there is no such thing as "freedom" except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life. — Erich Fromm

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

At the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it. — Erich Fromm

Life has ceased to be lived in a closed world the center of which was man; the world has become limitless and the same time threatening. By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life. He is threatened by powerful superpersonal forces, capital and the market. His relationship to his fellow men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged; he is free - that is, he is alone, isolated, threatened from all sides. [H]e is overwhelmed with a sense of his individual nothingness and helplessness. Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the world - a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening world. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety. — Erich Fromm

Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself. — Erich Fromm

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

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

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

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

Perhaps most trivial talk is a need to talk about oneself; hence, the never-ending subject of health and sickness, children, travel, successes, what one did, and the innumerable daily things that seem to be important. Since one cannot talk about oneself all the time without being thought a bore, one must exchange the privilege by a readiness to listen to others talking about themselves. Private social meetings between individuals (and often, also, meetings of all kinds of associations and groups) are little markets where one exchanges one's need to talk about oneself and one's desire to be listened to for the need of others who seek the same opportunity. Most people respect this arrangement of exchange; those who don't, and want to talk more about themselves than they are willing to listen, are "cheaters," and they are resented and have to choose inferior company in order to be tolerated. — Erich Fromm

The patient needs an experience, not an explanation. — Frieda Fromm-Reichmann

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

The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone. — 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

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

Independent of others and in concert with others, your main task in life is to do what you can best do and become what you can potentially be. — Erich Fromm

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

Aliveness always makes a beautiful. — Erich Fromm