Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “If America and the Western world continue in their state of unconscious hopelessness, lack of faith and of fortitude, it is predictable that they will not be able to resist the temptation of the big bang by nuclear weapons, which would end all problems – overpopulation, boredom, and hunger – since it would do away with all life.”

— Erich Fromm

252. “A relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading radio-listening culture.”

— Erich Fromm

253. “In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. “Having faith” in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change.”

— Erich Fromm

254. “But in many individuals in whom separateness is not relieved in other ways, the search for the sexual orgasm assumes a function which makes it not very different from alcoholism and drug addiction. It becomes a desperate attempt to escape the anxiety engendered by separateness, and it results in an ever-increasing sense of separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily. All.”

— Erich Fromm

255. “What holds true for the individual holds true for a society. It is never static; if it does not grow, it decays; if it does not transcend the status quo for the better, it changes for the worse. Often we, the individual or the people who make up a society, have the illusion we could stand still and not alter the given situation in the one or the other direction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions. The moment we stand still, we begin to decay.”

— Erich Fromm

256. “There are many who feel consciously hopeful and unconsciously hopeless, and there are few for whom it is the other way around.”

— Erich Fromm

257. “One of the most obvious explanations is that the leaders undertake many actions that make it possible for them to pretend they are doing something effective to avoid a catastrophe: endless conferences, resolutions, disarmament talks, all give the impression that the problems are recognized and something is being done to resolve them.”

— Erich Fromm

258. “When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life of his children. But one is bound to fail within oneself and for the children. The former because the problem of existence can be solved by each one only for himself, and not by proxy; the latter because one lacks in the very qualities which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer.”

— Erich Fromm

259. “There were always men who looked beyond the dimensions of their own society- and while they may have been called fools or criminals in their time they are the roster of great men as far as the record of human history is concerned- and visualized something which can be called universally human and which is not identical with what a particular society assumes human nature to be. There were always men who were bold and imaginative enough to see beyond the frontiers of their own existence.”

— Erich Fromm

260. “A free person owes an explanation only to himself, to his reason and his conscious, and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.”

— Erich Fromm

261. “Greed and peace preclude each other.”

— Erich Fromm

262. “We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigour, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self; to have faith in this self and in life.”

— Erich Fromm

263. “Indeed, with the experience of self disappears the experience of identity – and when this happens, man could become insane if he did not save himself by acquiring a secondary sense of self; he does that by experiencing himself as being approved of, worthwhile, successful, useful – briefly, as a salable commodity which is he because he is looked upon by others as an entity, not unique but fitting into one of the current patterns.”

— Erich Fromm

264. “To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but “information” alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it.”

— Erich Fromm

265. “Human existence begins when the lack of fixation of action by instincts exceeds a certain point; when the adaptation to nature loses its coercive character; when the way to act is no longer fixed by hereditarily given mechanisms. In other words, human existence and freedom are from the beginning inseparable. Freedom is here used not in its positive sense of “freedom to” but in its negative sense of “freedom from”, namely freedom from instinctual determination of his actions.”

— Erich Fromm

266. “For despite what some people say, love is not only a sweet falling bound to come and quickly go away.”

— Erich Fromm

267. “The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either.”

— Erich Fromm

268. “Education is helping the child realise his potentialities.”

— Erich Fromm

269. “Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.”

— Erich Fromm

270. “Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.”

— Erich Fromm

271. “The criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one, valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”

— Erich Fromm

272. “The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love – is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.”

— Erich Fromm

273. “I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If.”

— Erich Fromm

274. “When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.”

— Erich Fromm

275. “Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations.”

— Erich Fromm

276. “Love is active penetration of the other person, in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody – and I “know” nothing.”

— Erich Fromm

277. “If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune.”

— Erich Fromm

278. “There is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves. And there is nothing which brings us greater joy and happiness than to think, feel, and say what is ours.”

— Erich Fromm

279. “Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.”

— Erich Fromm

280. “Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have tr.”

— Erich Fromm

281. “If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love.”

— Erich Fromm

282. “Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.”

— Erich Fromm

283. “We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.”

— Erich Fromm

284. “I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.”

— Erich Fromm

285. “Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them.”

— Erich Fromm

286. “Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.”

— Erich Fromm

287. “Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.”

— Erich Fromm

288. “There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.”

— Erich Fromm

289. “The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.”

— Erich Fromm

290. “Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”

— Erich Fromm

291. “It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.”

— Erich Fromm

292. “For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice.”

— Erich Fromm

293. “Equality today means “sameness,” rather than “oneness.” It is the sameness of abstractions, of the men who work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, who read the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and the same ideas.”

— Erich Fromm

294. “When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the past – and about the future only as far as that it is death.”

— Erich Fromm

295. “Without effort and willingness to experience pain and anxiety, nobody grows, in fact nobody achieves anything worth achieving.”

— Erich Fromm

296. “The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.”

— Erich Fromm

297. “Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use. It is clear that respect is possible only if I have achieved independence; if I can stand and walk without needing crutches, without.”

— Erich Fromm

298. “One can only understand the power of the fear to be different, the fear to be only a few steps away from the herd, if one understands the depths of the need not to be separated.”

— Erich Fromm

299. “Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”

— Erich Fromm

300. “Man is the only animal that can be bored.”

— Erich Fromm