Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man’s need for collective art and ritual.”

— Erich Fromm

102. “Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.”

— Erich Fromm

103. “A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet “for sale,” who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence – briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing – cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society.”

— Erich Fromm

104. “The fact that millions of people take part in a delusion doesn’t make it sane.”

— Erich Fromm

105. “The courage of the authoritarian character is essentially a courage to suffer what fate or its personal representative or “leader” may have destined him for. To suffer without complaining is his highest virtue – not the courage of trying to end suffering or at least to diminish it. Not to change fate, but to submit to it, is the heroism of the authoritarian character.”

— Erich Fromm

106. “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

107. “That human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and hence that a whole society can be sick, is an assumption which was made very explicitly by Freud, most extensively in his Civilization and Its Discontent.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

109. “We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; 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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “It seems that great minds a hundred years ago saw what would happen today or tomorrow, while we to whom it is happening blind ourselves in order not to be disturbed in our daily routine.”

— Erich Fromm

114. “The value judgments we make determine our actions, and upon their validity rests our mental health and happiness.”

— Erich Fromm

115. “But man is not only made by history – history is made by man.”

— Erich Fromm

116. “Hope is a decisive element in any attempt to bring about social change in the direction of greater aliveness, awareness, and reason.”

— Erich Fromm

117. “Love is the productive form of relatedness to others and to oneself. It implies responsibility, care, respect. If it isn’t productive and respectful, it isn’t love, but only fear masquerading as love.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

119. “The mature response to the problem of existence is love.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

121. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

127. “Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of unaliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it.”

— Erich Fromm

128. “The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.”

— Erich Fromm

129. “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

130. “Freedom does not mean license.”

— Erich Fromm

131. “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

132. “Integrity simply means not violating one’s own identity.”

— Erich Fromm

133. “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

134. “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

135. “To take the difficulties, setbacks and sorrows of life as a challenge to overcome makes us stronger, rather than unjust punishment which should not happen to us, requires faith and courage.”

— Erich Fromm

136. “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

137. “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

138. “Man always dies before he is fully born.”

— Erich Fromm

139. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

141. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

143. “The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love.”

— Erich Fromm

144. “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

145. “It is time to cease to argue about God, and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry.”

— Erich Fromm

146. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

149. “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

150. “Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being – and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being. In essence, all human beings are identical. We are all part of One; we are One.”

— Erich Fromm