Erich Fromm Quotes

221 Sourced Quotes

Among most Christians the Old Testament is little read in comparison to the New Testament. Furthermore, much of what is read is often distorted by prejudice. Frequently the Old Testament is believed to express exclusively the principles of justice and revenge, in contrast to the New Testament, which represents those of love and mercy; even the sentence, Love your neighbor as yourself, is thought by many to derive from the New, not the Old Testament. Or the Old Testament is believed to have been written exclusively in the spirit of narrow nationalism and to contain nothing of supranational universalism so characteristic of the New Testament.

Erich Fromm
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

Erich Fromm
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.

Erich Fromm
Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings.

Erich Fromm
If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either.

Erich Fromm
Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason.

Erich Fromm
Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unite him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity.

Erich Fromm
The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.

Erich Fromm
People do not see that the main question is not : "Am I loved?" which is to a large extent the question : "Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?" The main question is: "Can I love?

Erich Fromm
In mysticism … the attempt is given up to know God by thought, and it is replaced by the experience of union with God in which there is no more room—and no need—for knowledge about God.

Erich Fromm
Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with — the love of life.

Erich Fromm
The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity, without panic and undue fear.

Erich Fromm
Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.

Erich Fromm
Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.

Erich Fromm
We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced — by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.

Erich Fromm
The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial experience of 'falling' in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of 'standing' in love.

Erich Fromm
Man unites himself with the world in the process of creation.

Erich Fromm
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
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.

Erich Fromm
Psychoanalysis, which interprets the human being as a socialized being, and the psychic apparatus as essentially developed and determined through the relationship of the individual to society, must consider it a duty to participate in the investigation of sociological problems to the extent the human being or his/her psyche plays any part at all.

Erich Fromm
One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one's life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.

Erich Fromm
That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.

Erich Fromm
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
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.

Erich Fromm
All great art is by its very essence in conflict with the society with which it exists. It expresses the truth about the existence regardless of whether this truth serves or hinders the survival purpose of a given society. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.

Erich Fromm
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.

Erich Fromm
Chronic boredom — compensated or uncompensated — constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.

Erich Fromm
The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.

Erich Fromm
By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents — blood, family, tribe — to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development.

Erich Fromm
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

Erich Fromm