Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 3 of 8

101. “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

102. “The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.”

— Erich Fromm

103. “Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.”

— Erich Fromm

104. “There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.”

— Erich Fromm

105. “To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.”

— Erich Fromm

106. “The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world. The consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle.”

— Erich Fromm

107. “In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”

— Erich Fromm

108. “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

109. “The scars left from the child’s defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.”

— Erich Fromm

110. “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

111. “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

112. “Freedom does not mean license.”

— Erich Fromm

113. “The passion for having must lead to never-ending class war. The pretense of the communists that their system will end class struggle by abolishing classes is fiction, for their system is based on the principle of unlimited consumption as the goal of living. As long as everybody wants to have more, there must be formations of classes, there must be class war, and in global terms, there must be international war. Greed and peace preclude each other.”

— Erich Fromm

114. “Man unites himself with the world in the process of creation.”

— Erich Fromm

115. “Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.”

— Erich Fromm

116. “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

117. “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

118. “Chronic boredom compensated or uncompensated constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.”

— Erich Fromm

119. “Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.”

— Erich Fromm

120. “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.”

— Erich Fromm

121. “Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love – yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love. This.”

— Erich Fromm

122. “The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense of life.”

— Erich Fromm

123. “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

124. “In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue.”

— Erich Fromm

125. “The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice.”

— Erich Fromm

126. “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

127. “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

128. “The basic for any approach to self-transformation is an ever-increasing awareness of reality and the shedding of illusions.”

— Erich Fromm

129. “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

130. “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

131. “Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.”

— Erich Fromm

132. “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

133. “The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.”

— Erich Fromm

134. “The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy.”

— Erich Fromm

135. “The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person and him of great joy is the difference between get and give.”

— Erich Fromm

136. “What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.”

— Erich Fromm

137. “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

138. “Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. 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

139. “The individual is freed from the bondage of economic and political ties. He also gains in positive freedom by the active and independent role which he has to play in the new system. But simultaneously he is freed from those ties which used to be lived in a closed world the center of which was man; the world has become limitless and at the same time threatening.”

— Erich Fromm

140. “The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation – and creation is always a miracle – is outside of his range of emotional experience.”

— Erich Fromm

141. “They have their big, ever-changing egos, but none has a self, a core, a sense of identity.”

— Erich Fromm

142. “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

143. “Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.”

— Erich Fromm

144. “Care, responsibility, respect and knowledge are mutually interdependent. They are a syndrome of attitudes which are to be found in the mature person; that is, in the person who develops his own powers productively, who only wants to have that which he has worked for, who has given up narcissistic dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, who has acquired humility based on the inner strength which only genuine productive activity can give.”

— Erich Fromm

145. “I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion.”

— Erich Fromm

146. “Mother’s love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there it is as if all the beauty had gone out of life.”

— Erich Fromm

147. “Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love.”

— Erich Fromm

148. “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

149. “To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.”

— Erich Fromm

150. “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