Top 430 Quotes & Sayings by Erich Fromm
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American psychologist Erich Fromm.
Last updated on September 9, 2024.
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Man always dies before he is fully born.
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
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.
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
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.
Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.
To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
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.
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.
Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
Respect is not fear and awe; it...[is]the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. 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.
Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.
An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.
It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.
The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being 'asocial' or 'irrational' in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.
Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
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