Erich Fromm Quotes
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301. “The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.”

— Erich Fromm

302. “The common suffering is the alienation from oneself, from one’s fellow man, and from nature; the awareness that life runs out of one’s hand like sand, and that one will die without having lived; that one lives in the midst of plenty and yet is joyless.”

— Erich Fromm

303. “People seek a new orientation, a new philosophy, one which is centered on the priorities of life-physically and spiritually-and not on the priorities of death.”

— Erich Fromm

304. “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

305. “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

306. “The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.”

— Erich Fromm

307. “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

308. “Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.”

— Erich Fromm

309. “If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.”

— Erich Fromm

310. “How should a man caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and of separateness?”

— Erich Fromm

311. “Independence is not achieved simply by not obeying mother, father, state, and the like. Independence is not the same as disobedience. Independence is possible only if, and according to the degree to which, man actively grasps the world, is related to it, and thus becomes one with it. There is no independence and no freedom unless man arrives at the stage of complete inner activity and productivity.”

— Erich Fromm

312. “We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.”

— Erich Fromm

313. “Know thyself” is one of the fundamental commands that aim at human strength and happiness.”

— Erich Fromm

314. “We... have created a greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race. Yet we have managed to kill off millions of our population in an arrangement which we call “war.”

— Erich Fromm

315. “Love is the only way of knowledge, which in the act of union answers my quest. In the act of loving, of giving myself, in the act of penetrating the other person, I find myself, I discover myself, I discover us both, I discover man.”

— Erich Fromm

316. “When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”

— Erich Fromm

317. “Man can only know the nagation, never the position of ultimate reality.”

— Erich Fromm

318. “Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their “personality packages” and hope for a fair bargain.”

— Erich Fromm

319. “If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it.”

— Erich Fromm

320. “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

321. “What matters is the effect, not the process.”

— Erich Fromm

322. “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

323. “I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.”

— Erich Fromm

324. “Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the world – a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening world. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety. These feelings must be alleviated if the individual is to function successfully.”

— Erich Fromm

325. “The need for speed and newness, which can only be satisfied by consumerism, reflects restlessness, the inner flight from oneself.”

— Erich Fromm

326. “If I am nothing but what I believe I am supposed to be – who am “I”?”

— Erich Fromm

327. “When people can see a vision and simultaneously recognize what can be done step by step in a concrete way to achieve it, they will begin to feel encouragement and enthusiasm instead of fright.”

— Erich Fromm

328. “Primary bonds once severed cannot be mended; once paradise is lost, man cannot return to it. There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.”

— Erich Fromm

329. “The right to express our thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own; freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if the inner psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality.”

— Erich Fromm

330. “I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way.”

— Erich Fromm

331. “What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.”

— Erich Fromm

332. “I cannot know who I am, because I don’t know which part of me is not me.”

— Erich Fromm

333. “One discovers answers to problems only when one feels that they are burning and that it is a a matter of life and death to solve them. Is nothing is of burning interest, one’s reason and one’s critical faculty operate on a low level of activity; it appears then that one lacks the faculty to observe.”

— Erich Fromm

334. “The development of man’s intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man’s brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.”

— Erich Fromm

335. “It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group.”

— Erich Fromm

336. “One concept of activity, the modern one, refers to the use of energy for the achievement of external aims; the other concept of activity refers to the use of man’s inherent powers, regardless of whether any external change is brought about.”

— Erich Fromm

337. “Why should anyone be so grateful for acceptance unless he doubts that he is acceptable, and why should a young, educated and successful couple have such doubts, if not due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves because they are not themselves.”

— Erich Fromm

338. “Obsessional work alone would drive people just as crazy as would complete laziness.”

— Erich Fromm

339. “The capacity to see and – equally so – blindness are not divisible. The critical faculty of the human mind is one: To believe one can be seeing internally but blind as far as the outside world is concerned is like saying that the light of a candle gives light only in one direction and not in all. The light of the candle is reason’s capacity for critical, penetrating, uncovering thought.”

— Erich Fromm

340. “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

341. “I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity.”

— Erich Fromm

342. “Giving is the highest expression of potency.”

— Erich Fromm

343. “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

344. “A society whose members are helpless need idols.”

— Erich Fromm

345. “People are afraid to concentrate because they are afraid of losing themselves if they are too absorbed in another person, in an idea, in an event. The less strong their self, the greater the fear of losing themselves in the act of concentration on the non-self.”

— Erich Fromm

346. “Mobilizing the love of life is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead.”

— Erich Fromm

347. “The greater the sense of powerlessness and the greater lack of authentic will, the more grows either submission or an obsessional desire for satisfaction of one’s whims and the insistence on arbitrariness.”

— Erich Fromm

348. “Force is camouflaged by consents; the consent is brought about the methods of mass suggestion.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

350. “The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life.”

— Erich Fromm