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Quotes by Erich Fromm

A vast sector of modern advertising... does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.
– Erich Fromm
As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
– Erich Fromm
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.
– Erich Fromm
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.
– Erich Fromm
Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.
– Erich Fromm
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
– 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
If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
– Erich Fromm
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
– Erich Fromm
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
– Erich Fromm
In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.
– Erich Fromm
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
– 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
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
– Erich Fromm
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
– 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
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
– 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
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
– Erich Fromm
Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
– Erich Fromm
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
– Erich Fromm
Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
– Erich Fromm
The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
– Erich Fromm
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
– Erich Fromm
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
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.
– Erich Fromm
The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
– Erich Fromm
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
– 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.
– Erich Fromm
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
– Erich Fromm
There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
– Erich Fromm
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
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
– Erich Fromm
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
– Erich Fromm
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
– Erich Fromm
To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
– Erich Fromm
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.
– Erich Fromm
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.
– Erich Fromm
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
– Erich Fromm
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
– Erich Fromm
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.
– Erich Fromm
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
– 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
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
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
– Erich Fromm
Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
– Erich Fromm
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.
– Erich Fromm