Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “The more man gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an ‘individual,’ he has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world that destroys his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.”

— Erich Fromm

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

330. “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

331. “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

332. “God explains to Jonah that the essence of love is to “labor” for something and “to make something grow,” that love and labor are inseparable. One loves that for which one labors, and one labors for that which one loves.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

337. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

343. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

349. “Only dogmatic thinking, the result of the laziness of mind and heart, tries to construct simplistic schemes of the either-or type that block any real understanding.”

— Erich Fromm

350. “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