Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “The mature response to the problem of existence is love.”

— Erich Fromm

152. “Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one’s identity, in the many ways in which such violation is possible.”

— Erich Fromm

153. “Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.”

— Erich Fromm

154. “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

155. “Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

165. “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

166. “You do many things at once; you read, listen to the radio, talk, smoke, eat, drink. You are the consumer with the open mouth, eager and ready to swallow everything – pictures, liquor, knowledge. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves. To sit still, without talking, smoking, reading, drinking, is impossible for most people. They become nervous and fidgety, and must do something with their mouth or their hands.”

— Erich Fromm

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

174. “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

175. “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

176. “Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.”

— 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. “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

179. “If a person does not emerge from incestuous attachment to mother, clan, nation, if he retains the childish dependence on a punishing and rewarding father, or any other authority, he cannot develop a more mature love for God; then his religion is that of the earlier phase of religion, in which God was experienced as an all-protective mother or a punishing rewarding father. In.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

187. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

189. “To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.”

— Erich Fromm

190. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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