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Not only thinking and feeling are determined by man's character structure but also his actions. -- Erich Fromm
Those who unconsciously despair yet put on the mask of optimism are not necessarily wise. But those who have not given up hope can succeed only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all illusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties. -- Erich Fromm
since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present. -- Erich Fromm
Independent of others and in concert with others, your main task in life is to do what you can best do and become what you can potentially be. -- Erich Fromm
Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love. -- Erich Fromm
In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child's separation. -- Erich Fromm
The more man understands and masters nature the less he needs to use religion as a scientific explanation and as a magical device for controlling nature. -- Erich Fromm
Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. -- Erich Fromm
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 -- Erich Fromm
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. -- Erich Fromm
Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be. Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you'll live as you've never lived before. -- 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
To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness -- Erich Fromm
To know and yet [think] we do not know is the highest [attainment]; not to know [and yet think] we do know is a disease. -- Erich Fromm
The human desire to experience union with others is rooted in the specific conditions of existence that characterize the human species and is one of the strongest motivators of human behavior. -- Erich Fromm
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love -- Erich Fromm
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
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
I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself. -- Erich Fromm
The value judgments we make determine our actions, and upon their validity rests our mental health and happiness. -- 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
Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it. -- Erich Fromm
[E]thical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief. -- Erich Fromm
If I am nothing but what I believe I am supposed to be - who am "I"? -- Erich Fromm
There are many who feel consciously hopeful and unconsciously hopeless, and there are few for whom it is the other way around. -- 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
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
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
Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology. -- Erich Fromm
The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside. -- Erich Fromm
As a child, every human being passes through a state of powerlessness, and truth is one of the strongest weapons of those who have no power. -- Erich Fromm
Equality today means "sameness," rather than "oneness." It is the sameness of abstractions, of the men who work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, who read the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and the same ideas. -- Erich Fromm
People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love , power , fame , revenge . Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent. -- Erich Fromm
Man can only know the nagation, never the position of ultimate reality. -- Erich Fromm
On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man's need for collective art and ritual. -- Erich Fromm
Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture. -- 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
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
In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy. -- Erich Fromm
For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice. -- Erich Fromm
If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue - and not a vice - to love myself, since I am a human being too. -- Erich Fromm
There is only one reality: the act of feeling ourselves in the process of making choices. -- Erich Fromm
The fact that millions of people take part in a delusion doesn't make it sane. -- Erich Fromm
Happiness is a man's greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside. -- Erich Fromm
I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored. -- Erich Fromm
Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation. -- Erich Fromm
Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness. -- Erich Fromm
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies. -- Erich Fromm
Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one's own wishes with existing reality. -- Erich Fromm
The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. -- Erich Fromm
Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built. -- Erich Fromm
It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides. -- Erich Fromm
Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations. -- Erich Fromm
Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a "standing in," not a "falling for." In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving. -- 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
Hitler reacted primarily in a sadistic fashion toward people, but masochistically toward fate, history, the "higher power" of nature. -- 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
Mother's love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there it is as if all the beauty had gone out of life. -- Erich Fromm
Our problem is to discover a principle of differentiation and yet relationship lucid enough to justify and to purify both scientific and philosophical knowledge by accepting their mutual independence. -- Erich Fromm
If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune. -- Erich Fromm
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
[S]ex no longer frightens people; it can no longer be used to develop a sense of guilt, and thereby to force submission. -- 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 - although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born. -- Erich Fromm
Know thyself is one of the fundamental commands that aim at human strength and happiness. -- Erich Fromm
I believe that none can "save" his fellow man by making a choice for him. To help him, he can indicate the possible alternatives, with sincerity and love, without being sentimental and
without illusion. -- Erich Fromm
Reality imposes its law on man, laws that he can only escape in dreams or in states of trance - or in insanity. -- Erich Fromm
Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint. -- Erich Fromm
Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. -- 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
We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree to which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and love. -- Erich Fromm
The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. -- Erich Fromm
Man's nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history. -- Erich Fromm
If we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals ... We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities. -- Erich Fromm
To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable. -- Erich Fromm
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
If i am what i have, and i lose what i have, who then am i? -- Erich Fromm
Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness. -- Erich Fromm
Gravity is the root of lightness; stillness the ruler of movement. (Mueller, op. cit., p. 69.) -- Erich Fromm
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. -- Erich Fromm
In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue. -- Erich Fromm
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. -- Erich Fromm
To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow. -- Erich Fromm
To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid. -- Erich Fromm
Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. -- Erich Fromm
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
As long as one was an integral part of that world, unaware of the possibilities and responsibilities of individual action, one did not need to be afraid of it. When one has become an individual , one stands alone and faces the world in all its perilous and overpowering aspects. -- Erich Fromm
But man is not only made by history - history is made by man. -- Erich Fromm
The deepest need of the human being is to overcome our
separateness, to leave the prison of our loneliness. -- Erich Fromm
The intensity and excitement which accompanies moments of infatuation is frequently relative to the degree of loneliness and isolation which has been previously experienced. -- Erich Fromm
What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture. -- Erich Fromm
If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either. -- Erich Fromm
To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death. -- Erich Fromm
There is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves. And there is nothing which brings us greater joy and happiness than to think, feel, and say what is ours. -- Erich Fromm
The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self
to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer,
and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden:
the self. -- Erich Fromm
Having lost religious faith and the humanistic values bound up with it, he [man] concentrated on technical and material values and lost the capacity for deep emotional experiences, for the joy and sadness that accompany them. -- Erich Fromm
Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. -- Erich Fromm
To some people return to religion is the answer, not as an act of faith but in order to escape an intolerable doubt; they make this decision not out of devotion but in search of security. -- Erich Fromm
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal. -- Erich Fromm
The only way of full knowledge lies in the act of love; this act transcends thought, it transcends words. It is the daring plunge into the experience of union. -- Erich Fromm
Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought. -- Erich Fromm
Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions. -- Erich Fromm
The right to express out 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
The anxiety engendered by confronting the abyss of nothingness [of the loss of self] is more terrifying than the tortures of hell. In the vision of hell, I am punished and tortured - In the vision of nothingness I am driven to the border of madness - because I cannot say 'I' any more. -- Erich Fromm
Man is the only animal that can be bored. -- Erich Fromm
Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. -- Erich Fromm
Creativity is the ability to see and to respond. -- Erich Fromm
The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man. -- Erich Fromm
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
The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy. -- 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
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
Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life. -- 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
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 danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. -- Erich Fromm
Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines. -- Erich Fromm
Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. -- Erich Fromm
To be naive and easily deceived is impermissible, today more than ever, when the prevailing untruths may lead to a catastrophe because they blind people to real dangers and real possibilities. -- Erich Fromm
Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself. -- Erich Fromm
Friendliness, cheerfulness, and everything that a smile is supposed to express, become automatic responses which one turns on and off like an electric switch. -- Erich Fromm
It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live. -- Erich Fromm
All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual. -- Erich Fromm
[W]hat a person considers the minimal necessities depends as much on his character as it depends on his actual possessions. -- Erich Fromm
Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated ... what is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow man and from nature. -- Erich Fromm
The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is. -- Erich Fromm
The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep. -- Erich Fromm
[T}he sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily. -- Erich Fromm
We are what we do. -- Erich Fromm
FORTITUDE IS THE CAPACITY TO SAY NO WHEN THE WORLD WANTS TO HEAR 'YES' -- 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
Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has
been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not
grown. -- Erich Fromm
At the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it. -- 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
One can hardly overestimate people's need to talk about themselves and to be listened to. -- Erich Fromm
We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams ... we are also more inteligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake. -- Erich Fromm
A third way of attaining union lies in creative activity, be it that of the artist, or of the artisan. In any kind of creative work the creating person unites himself with his material, which represents the world outside -- Erich Fromm
An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality. -- Erich Fromm
Nature is the great power we have to submit to, but living beings are the ones we should dominate. -- Erich Fromm
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. -- Erich Fromm
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve. -- Erich Fromm
The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity. -- Erich Fromm
To be concentrated means to live fully in the present. -- Erich Fromm
Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love - yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love. This -- Erich Fromm
It is desirable to avoid trivial and evil company altogether - unless one can assert oneself fully, and thus make the other doubt his own position. -- Erich Fromm
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
It is time to cease to argue about God , and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry. -- Erich Fromm
Love is active penetration of the other person, in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody - and I "know" nothing. -- Erich Fromm
As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask. -- Erich Fromm
Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution. -- Erich Fromm
The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula "I am we"; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an "individual," existing apart from his group. -- Erich Fromm
The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present. -- Erich Fromm
Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them. -- Erich Fromm
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
But not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man. -- Erich Fromm
If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love. -- Erich Fromm
The field of human relations in Freud's sense is similar to the market - it is an exchange of satisfaction of biologically given needs, in which the relationship to the other individual is always a means to an end but never an end in itself. -- Erich Fromm
the key problem of psychology is that of the specific kind of relatedness of the individual towards the world and not that of the satisfaction or frustration of this or that instinctual need per se -- Erich Fromm
The confusion between temperament and character has had serious consequences for ethical theory. Preferences with regard to differences in temperament are mere matters of subjective taste.
But differences in character are ethically of the most fundamental importance. -- Erich Fromm
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
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. -- Erich Fromm
I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is, they would say, if they are honest, that it is a big department store, with new things every week - all the money to buy them, and maybe a little more than the neighbours. -- Erich Fromm
They have their big, ever-changing egos, but none has a self, a core, a sense of identity. -- Erich Fromm
Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life. -- Erich Fromm
Education is helping the child realise his potentialities. -- 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
Lack of concentration makes one tired, while concentration wakes one up. -- Erich Fromm
The activity at this very moment must be the only thing that matters, to which one is fully given. If one is concentrated, it matters little what one is doing. The important, as well as the unimportant things, assume a new dimension of reality, because they have one's full attention. -- Erich Fromm
There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail. -- Erich Fromm
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane. -- Erich Fromm
As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found- in himself. -- Erich Fromm
Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity. -- Erich Fromm
If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?
Nobody but a defeated, deflated, pathetic testimony to a wrong way of living. -- Erich Fromm
Looking for the next thing to do or the newest gadget to use is only a means of protecting oneself from being close to oneself or to another person. -- 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
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. -- Erich Fromm
Only in the love of those who do not serve a purpose, love begins to unfold. -- Erich Fromm
True love is like a pair of socks: you gotta have two and they've gotta match. -- Erich Fromm
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
[T]he 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
The full humanization of man requires the breakthrough from the possession-centered to the activity-centered orientation, from selfishness and egotism to solidarity and altruism. -- Erich Fromm
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. -- Erich Fromm
I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism. -- Erich Fromm
The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science. -- Erich Fromm
Today I, tomorrow you. But this need of help does not mean that the one is helpless, the other powerful. Helplesness is a transitory condition; the ability to stand and walk on one's own feet is the permanent and common one -- Erich Fromm
Human beings had two basic orientations: HAVING and BEING
HAVING: seeks to acquire, posses things even people
BEING: focuses on the experience; exchanging, engaging, sharing with other people -- Erich Fromm
If you do not smile, you are judged lacking in a 'pleasing personality' - and you need to have a pleasing personality if you want to sell your services, whether as a waitress, a salesman, or a physician. -- Erich Fromm
Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity, in the many ways in which such violation is possible. -- Erich Fromm
The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most. -- Erich Fromm
Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our
insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult ... 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
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
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
While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements. -- Erich Fromm
While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person. -- Erich Fromm
Mobilizing the love of life is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead. -- Erich Fromm
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
Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine. -- Erich Fromm
Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him. -- Erich Fromm
When people can't handle God any more, they turn to religion. -- Erich Fromm
Freedom does not mean license. -- 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
A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul. -- Erich Fromm
Love is hot a higher power which descends upon mn nor a duty which is imposed upon him; it is his own power by which he relates himself to the world and makes it truly his. -- Erich Fromm
Will is based on activity, whim on passivity. -- Erich Fromm
Men are born equal but they are also born different. -- Erich Fromm
Man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way; but only almost. -- Erich Fromm
It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health. -- Erich Fromm
If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it. -- Erich Fromm
The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things. -- Erich Fromm
Once they are through the process of education, most people lose the capacity of wondering, of being surprised. They feel they ought to know everything, and hence that it is a sign of ignorance to be surprised or puzzled by anything. -- Erich Fromm
Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?..Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission? -- Erich Fromm
What matters is the effect, not the process. -- Erich Fromm
To be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this, or that - there is always a fear that love could disappear. -- Erich Fromm
The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense of life. -- Erich Fromm
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist. -- Erich Fromm
Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours. -- Erich Fromm
We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. -- Erich Fromm
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
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
I think that the word bored does not get the attention it deserves. We speak of all sorts of terrible things that happen to people, but we rarely speak about one of the most terrible things of all : that is, being bored, being bored alone and, worse than that, being bored together. -- Erich Fromm
The basic for any approach to self-transformation is an ever-increasing awareness of reality and the shedding of illusions. -- Erich Fromm
In other words, ideas can become powerful forces, but only to the extent to which they are answers to specific human needs prominent in a given social character. -- Erich Fromm
Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning. -- Erich Fromm
Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in
themselves. -- Erich Fromm
I wonder sometimes whether a person has to become insane these days in order to feel certain things. Lessing once said, Who doesn't become insane over certain things, has no sanity to lose, -- Erich Fromm
Whether ... a change from the supremacy of natural science to a new social science will take place ... depends on one factor: how many brilliant, learned, disciplined, and caring men and women are attracted by the new challenge ... -- Erich Fromm
It seems that great minds a hundred years ago saw what would happen today or tomorrow, while we to whom it is happening blind ourselves in order not to be disturbed in our daily routine. -- Erich Fromm
I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between "life" and "death"; between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity
and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission. -- Erich Fromm
The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own -- Erich Fromm
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
The Jewish and particularly the Christian traditions have stressed the element of sin but have ignored the fact that it is the emancipation from the security of Paradise which is the basis for man's truly human development. -- Erich Fromm
Without effort and willingness to experience pain and anxiety, nobody grows, in fact nobody achieves anything worth achieving. -- Erich Fromm
Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being - and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being. In essence, all human beings are identical. We are all part of One; we are One. -- Erich Fromm
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
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
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
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. -- Erich Fromm
Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. -- Erich Fromm
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
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
God explains to Jonah that the essence of love is to "labor" for something and "to make something grow, -- Erich Fromm
Freedom is the fundamental condition for any growth. -- Erich Fromm
There is undoubtedly a difference between people who manipulate other people and people who create things. -- Erich Fromm
Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much. -- Erich Fromm
The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love -- Erich Fromm
The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life. -- Erich Fromm
When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the past - and about the future only as far as that it is death. -- Erich Fromm
The hoarders, who are anxiously worried about losing something, are, psychologically speaking, the poor impoverished people, regardless of how much they have. Whoever is capable of giving of themselves is rich. -- Erich Fromm
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two. -- Erich Fromm
The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have. -- Erich Fromm
Force is camouflaged by consents; the consent is brought about the methods of mass suggestion. -- Erich Fromm
I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion. -- Erich Fromm
You have to stop to change direction. -- Erich Fromm
There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group. -- Erich Fromm
The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born. -- Erich Fromm
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
If the religious system does not correspond to the prevalent social character, if it conflicts with the social practice of life, it is only an ideology. -- Erich Fromm
If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself, too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all. -- Erich Fromm
Women are equal because they are not different any more. -- Erich Fromm
The task of critique is not to denounce the ideals, but to show their transformation into ideologies, and to challenge the ideology in the name of the betrayed ideal -- 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
Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers. -- Erich Fromm
Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled, to concentrate, to accept conflict and tension, to be born every day, to feel a sense of self. -- 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
The absolutely alienated individual worships at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is known. -- Erich Fromm
The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world. The consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle. -- Erich Fromm
Mother is the home we come from.
She is nature, soil, ocean. -- Erich Fromm
Escape from Freedom attempts to show, modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton. -- Erich Fromm
Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision. -- Erich Fromm
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you. -- Erich Fromm
Man's main task is to give birth to himself. -- Erich Fromm
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
What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it requires the capacity to be puzzled. Children still have the capacity to be puzzled. -- Erich Fromm
Love is the productive form of relatedness to others and to oneself. It implies responsibility, care, respect. If it isn't productive and respectful, it isn't love, but only fear masquerading as love. -- Erich Fromm
Love is a power which produces love. -- Erich Fromm
The newspapers, the magazines, television, and radio produce a commodity: news, from the raw material of events. Only news is salable, and the news media determine which events are news, which are not. -- Erich Fromm
The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event. -- Erich Fromm
A society whose members are helpless need idols. -- Erich Fromm
I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice. -- 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
Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings. -- Erich Fromm
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
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others. -- Erich Fromm
Man absolutely cannot live by himself. -- Erich Fromm
It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it. -- Erich Fromm
The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. -- Erich Fromm
Today the lack of faith is an expression of profound confusion and despair. Once skepticism and rationalism were progressive forces for the development of thought; now they have become rationalizations for relativism and uncertainty. -- Erich Fromm
The mature response to the problem of existence is love. -- 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
The outer chains have simply been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains. -- Erich Fromm
Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream. -- Erich Fromm
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
Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life. -- Erich Fromm
Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love towards themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others. -- Erich Fromm
Love is an act of faith. -- Erich Fromm
If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I? -- Erich Fromm
All men are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual. -- Erich Fromm
The assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object , not the problem of a faculty . 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
A new question has arisen in modern man's mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living ... No sensible answer can be given to the question ... because the question does not make any sense. -- Erich Fromm
Productive work, love and thought are possible only if a person can be, when necessary, quiet and alone. To be able to listen to oneself is the necessary condition for relating oneself to others. -- Erich Fromm
Aliveness always makes a beautiful. -- Erich Fromm
If there is no evidence that sport lowers aggression, at the same time it should be said that there is also no evidence that sport is motivated by aggression. -- Erich Fromm
In the view of the wise, Heaven is man and Earth woman: Earth fosters what Heaven lets fall. -- Erich Fromm
Man may be defined as the animal that can say 'I,' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity. -- Erich Fromm
The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love. -- Erich Fromm
We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save. -- Erich Fromm
Human history began with an act of disobedience and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience -- Erich Fromm
You have to stop in order to change direction. -- Erich Fromm
We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization. -- Erich Fromm
Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man. -- Erich Fromm
He gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness - of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. -- 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
Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book. -- Erich Fromm
I cannot know who I am, because I don't know which part of me is not me. -- Erich Fromm
Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed, truly human man. -- Erich Fromm
[T]he need for speed and newness, which can only be satisfied by consumerism, reflects restlessness, the inner flight from oneself. -- Erich Fromm
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. -- Erich Fromm
Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown. -- Erich Fromm
Integrity simply means not violating one's own identity. -- Erich Fromm
To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops. -- Erich Fromm
In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation. -- Erich Fromm
TO ACCEPT THE DIFFICULTIES,SETBACKS AND TRAGEDIES OF LIFE AS A CHALLENGE WHICH TO OVERCOME MAKES US STRONGER, RATHER THAN AS SOMETHING THAT SHOULD NOT HAPPEN TO US REQUIRES FAITH AND COURAGE -- Erich Fromm
The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it -- Erich Fromm
When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of man fell with it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory. -- Erich Fromm
The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self. -- Erich Fromm
The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life. -- Erich Fromm
this absolute power of God over man is counterbalanced by the idea that man is God's potential rival. -- Erich Fromm
When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism. -- Erich Fromm
The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as
drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. -- Erich Fromm
Capitalism puts things (capital) higher than life (labor). Power follows from possession, not from activity. -- Erich Fromm
Any society, in order to survive, must mold the character of its members in such a way that they want to do what they have to do; their social function must become internalized and transformed into something they feel driven to do, rather than something they are obliged to do. -- Erich Fromm
The doubt itself will not disappear as long as man does not overcome his isolation and as long as his place in the world has not become a meaningful one in terms of his human needs. -- Erich Fromm
The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge. -- Erich Fromm
Man unites himself with the world in the process of creation. -- Erich Fromm
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. -- Erich Fromm
Freedom is not something we have, there is no such thing as freedom. Freedom is a quality of our personality: we are more or less free to resist pressure, more or less free to do what we want and to be ourselves. Freedom is always a question of increasing freedom one has, or decreasing it. -- Erich Fromm
I need you because I love you. -- Erich Fromm
Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their "personality packages" and hope for a fair bargain. -- Erich Fromm
Mother's love always peace as it not to be acquired nor deserved. -- Erich Fromm
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love. -- Erich Fromm
The ultimate choice for a man, in as much as he is given to transcend himself, is to create or destroy, to love or to hate. -- 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
Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. -- Erich Fromm
Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain. -- Erich Fromm
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers. -- Erich Fromm
Death is never sweet, not even if it is suffered for the highest ideal. -- 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
The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis. -- Erich Fromm
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself. -- Erich Fromm
Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth. -- Erich Fromm
Man always dies before he is fully born. -- Erich Fromm
They were more free, but they were more alone. -- 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 <>trong>trtrong> -- Erich Fromm
