Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

53. “Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself.”

— Erich Fromm

54. “Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.”

— Erich Fromm

55. “I need you because I love you.”

— Erich Fromm

56. “In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child’s separation.”

— Erich Fromm

57. “Men are born equal but they are also born different.”

— Erich Fromm

58. “Productive work, love and thought are possible only if a person can be, when necessary, quiet and alone. To be able to listen to oneself is the necessary condition for relating oneself to others.”

— Erich Fromm

59. “Love is a power which produces love.”

— Erich Fromm

60. “That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

— Erich Fromm

61. “To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”

— Erich Fromm

62. “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

63. “As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.”

— Erich Fromm

64. “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

65. “There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue.”

— Erich Fromm

66. “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

67. “I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.”

— Erich Fromm

68. “Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.”

— Erich Fromm

69. “One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”

— Erich Fromm

70. “Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.”

— Erich Fromm

71. “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

72. “Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?”

— Erich Fromm

73. “Creativity is the ability to see and to respond.”

— Erich Fromm

74. “The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most.”

— Erich Fromm

75. “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

76. “While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person.”

— Erich Fromm

77. “The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.”

— Erich Fromm

78. “Society must be organized in such a way that mans social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.”

— Erich Fromm

79. “To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.”

— Erich Fromm

80. “Man’s biological weakness is the condition of human culture.”

— Erich Fromm

81. “What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it requires the capacity to be puzzled. Children still have the capacity to be puzzled.”

— Erich Fromm

82. “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

83. “The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.”

— Erich Fromm

84. “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

85. “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

86. “Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.”

— Erich Fromm

87. “The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.”

— Erich Fromm

88. “The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.”

— Erich Fromm

89. “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

— Erich Fromm

90. “In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”

— Erich Fromm

91. “The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own.”

— Erich Fromm

92. “Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.”

— Erich Fromm

93. “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

94. “The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things.”

— Erich Fromm

95. “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

96. “Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love towards themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others.”

— Erich Fromm

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

100. “The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it.”

— Erich Fromm