Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

155. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

162. “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

163. “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

164. “An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and “belonging.” On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances present.”

— Erich Fromm

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

172. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

174. “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

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. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “Faith is not a weak form of belief or knowledge; it is not faith in this or that; faith is the conviction about the not yet proven, the knowledge of the real possibility, the awareness of pregnancy.”

— Erich Fromm

191. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

196. “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

197. “Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of destruction.”

— Erich Fromm

198. “When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of man fell with it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory.”

— Erich Fromm

199. “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

200. “In other words, ideas can become powerful forces, but only to the extent to which they are answers to specific human needs prominent in a given social character.”

— Erich Fromm