Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 6 of 8

251. “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

252. “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

253. “Greed and peace preclude each other.”

— Erich Fromm

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

258. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of unaliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

269. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

281. “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

282. “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

283. “The fact that millions of people take part in a delusion doesn’t make it sane.”

— Erich Fromm

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

288. “Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers.”

— Erich Fromm

289. “There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.”

— Erich Fromm

290. “Beyond the element of giving, the active characteristic of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsability, respect and knowledge.”

— Erich Fromm

291. “The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.”

— Erich Fromm

292. “Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

294. “There is undoubtedly a difference between people who manipulate other people and people who create things.”

— Erich Fromm

295. “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

296. “People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love – or to be loved by – is difficult.”

— Erich Fromm

297. “Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.”

— Erich Fromm

298. “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

299. “The person who is normal in terms of being well adapted is often less healthy than the neurotic person in terms of human values. Often he is well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes he is expected to be.”

— Erich Fromm

300. “If one candle is brought into an absolutely dark room, the darkness disappears, and there is light. But if ten or a hundred or a thousand candles are added, the room will become brighter and brighter. Yet the decisive change was brought about by the first candle which penetrated the darkness.57.”

— Erich Fromm