Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “In the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.”

— Erich Fromm

202. “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

203. “Once they are through the process of education, most people lose the capacity of wondering, of being surprised. They feel they ought to know everything, and hence that it is a sign of ignorance to be surprised or puzzled by anything.”

— Erich Fromm

204. “To be concentrated means to live fully in the present, in the here and now, and not to think of the next thing to be done, while I am doing something right now.”

— Erich Fromm

205. “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

206. “Lack of concentration makes one tired, while concentration wakes one up.”

— Erich Fromm

207. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

209. “Reality imposes its law on man, laws that he can only escape in dreams or in states of trance – or in insanity.”

— Erich Fromm

210. “The approach of normative humanism is based on the assumption that, as in any other problem, there are right and wrong, satisfactory and unsatisfactory solutions to the problem of human existence.”

— Erich Fromm

211. “It is desirable to avoid trivial and evil company altogether – unless one can assert oneself fully, and thus make the other doubt his own position.”

— Erich Fromm

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

216. “Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology.”

— Erich Fromm

217. “Man absolutely cannot live by himself.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

219. “Man’s nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.”

— Erich Fromm

220. “We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for.”

— Erich Fromm

221. “The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula “I am we”; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an “individual,” existing apart from his group.”

— Erich Fromm

222. “Selfishness is not identical with self-love but with its very opposite. Selfishness is one kind of greediness. Like all greediness, it contains an insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”

— Erich Fromm

223. “They were more free, but they were more alone.”

— Erich Fromm

224. “Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows ‘what he wants,’ while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.”

— Erich Fromm

225. “Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life.”

— Erich Fromm

226. “Unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure.”

— Erich Fromm

227. “The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man.”

— Erich Fromm

228. “Those who unconsciously despair yet put on the mask of optimism are not necessarily wise. But those who have not given up hope can succeed only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all illusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties.”

— Erich Fromm

229. “Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.”

— Erich Fromm

230. “Authority is not a quality one person ‘has,’ in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.”

— Erich Fromm

231. “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

232. “Any society, in order to survive, must mold the character of its members in such a way that they want to do what they have to do; their social function must become internalized and transformed into something they feel driven to do, rather than something they are obliged to do.”

— Erich Fromm

233. “It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.”

— Erich Fromm

234. “If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either.”

— Erich Fromm

235. “The doubt itself will not disappear as long as man does not overcome his isolation and as long as his place in the world has not become a meaningful one in terms of his human needs.”

— Erich Fromm

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

247. “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

248. “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

249. “Wer bin ich, wenn ich bin, was ich habe und dann verliere, was ich habe?”

— Erich Fromm

250. “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