Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

157. “The outer chains have simply been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains. This is so because man can at least be aware of outer chains but be unaware of inner chains, carrying them with the illusion that he is free. He can try to overthrow the outer chains, but how can he rid himself of chains of whose existence he is unaware? Any.”

— Erich Fromm

158. “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

159. “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

160. “The sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily...”

— Erich Fromm

161. “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

162. “The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.”

— Erich Fromm

163. “If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, “I love you,” I must be able to say, “I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.”

— Erich Fromm

164. “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

165. “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

166. “To be naive and easily deceived is impermissible, today more than ever, when the prevailing untruths may lead to a catastrophe because they blind people to real dangers and real possibilities.”

— Erich Fromm

167. “If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue – and not a vice – to love myself, since I am a human being too.”

— Erich Fromm

168. “The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is.”

— Erich Fromm

169. “While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements.”

— Erich Fromm

170. “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

171. “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

172. “Freedom is not something we have, there is no such thing as freedom. Freedom is a quality of our personality: we are more or less free to resist pressure, more or less free to do what we want and to be ourselves. Freedom is always a question of increasing freedom one has, or decreasing it.”

— Erich Fromm

173. “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

174. “To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death.”

— Erich Fromm

175. “Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with – the love of life.”

— Erich Fromm

176. “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

177. “Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance, albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking process attempts to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of logic and plausibility.”

— Erich Fromm

178. “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

179. “Death is never sweet, not even if it is suffered for the highest ideal.”

— Erich Fromm

180. “To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid.”

— Erich Fromm

181. “If you do not smile, you are judged lacking in a ‘pleasing personality’ – and you need to have a pleasing personality if you want to sell your services, whether as a waitress, a salesman, or a physician.”

— Erich Fromm

182. “Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.”

— Erich Fromm

183. “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

184. “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

185. “The human desire to experience union with others is rooted in the specific conditions of existence that characterize the human species and is one of the strongest motivators of human behavior.”

— Erich Fromm

186. “In the sphere of material things giving means being rich. Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.”

— Erich Fromm

187. “The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers. Hence to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the world – things and people – actively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react.”

— Erich Fromm

188. “Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book.”

— Erich Fromm

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189. “Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one’s own wishes with existing reality.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

191. “To be loved because of one’s merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this, or that – there is always a fear that love could disappear.”

— Erich Fromm

192. “The unity achieved in productive work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is transitory; the unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence, they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love.”

— Erich Fromm

193. “In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.”

— Erich Fromm

194. “I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is, they would say, if they are honest, that it is a big department store, with new things every week – all the money to buy them, and maybe a little more than the neighbours.”

— Erich Fromm

195. “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

196. “Love is hot a higher power which descends upon mn nor a duty which is imposed upon him; it is his own power by which he relates himself to the world and makes it truly his.”

— Erich Fromm

197. “When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”

— Erich Fromm

198. “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

199. “The more man understands and masters nature the less he needs to use religion as a scientific explanation and as a magical device for controlling nature.”

— Erich Fromm

200. “The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.”

— Erich Fromm

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