Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”

— Erich Fromm

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Creativity Quotes, Spirituality Quotes, Letting Go Quotes

2. “Love is an act of faith.”

— Erich Fromm

Featured in: Faith Quotes, Romantic Quotes, Love Is Quotes

3. “Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”

— Erich Fromm

Featured in: Effort Quotes, Quotes About Greed

4. “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’”

— Erich Fromm

5. “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

Featured in: Faith Quotes, Romantic Quotes

6. “Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.”

— Erich Fromm

Featured in: Confidence Quotes

7. “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”

— Erich Fromm

Featured in: Philosophical Quotes

8. “Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.”

— Erich Fromm

Featured in: Quotes About Greed

9. “Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.”

— Erich Fromm

10. “Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be. Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.”

— Erich Fromm

11. “If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?”

— Erich Fromm

12. “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

13. “An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.”

— Erich Fromm

14. “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

Featured in: Character Quotes

15. “It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.”

— Erich Fromm

16. “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

17. “Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”

— Erich Fromm

18. “Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.”

— Erich Fromm

19. “Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.”

— Erich Fromm

20. “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

21. “To love somebody is not just a strong feeling – it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.”

— Erich Fromm

Featured in: Strong Quotes

22. “There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.”

— Erich Fromm

23. “Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.”

— Erich Fromm

24. “To be concentrated means to live fully in the present.”

— Erich Fromm

25. “Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.”

— Erich Fromm

26. “The affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one’s capacity to love.”

— Erich Fromm

27. “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

28. “Freedom is the fundamental condition for any growth.”

— Erich Fromm

29. “Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.”

— Erich Fromm

30. “In times of change, learners inherit the earth.”

— Erich Fromm

31. “The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

— Erich Fromm

32. “We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent – people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.”

— Erich Fromm

33. “Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.”

— Erich Fromm

34. “Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.”

— Erich Fromm

35. “A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.”

— Erich Fromm

36. “Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.”

— Erich Fromm

37. “Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.”

— Erich Fromm

38. “Happiness is a man’s greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside.”

— Erich Fromm

39. “Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.”

— Erich Fromm

40. “The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.”

— Erich Fromm

41. “The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.”

— Erich Fromm

42. “I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.”

— Erich Fromm

43. “To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge.”

— Erich Fromm

44. “Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.”

— Erich Fromm

45. “The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.”

— Erich Fromm

46. “When people can’t handle God any more, they turn to religion.”

— Erich Fromm

47. “The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind – not the fiend or the sadist.”

— Erich Fromm

48. “Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself.”

— Erich Fromm

49. “The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.”

— Erich Fromm

50. “You have to stop in order to change direction.”

— Erich Fromm