Famous Erich Fromm Quotations

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"To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable."
by Erich Fromm
"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
by Erich Fromm
"The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal."
by Erich Fromm
"Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve."
by 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."
by Erich Fromm
"Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much."
by Erich Fromm
"If it were not for hopes, the heart would break."
by 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."
by 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."
by 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."
by Erich Fromm
"Dreams - A microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul."
by Erich Fromm
"Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines."
by 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."
by Erich Fromm
"Immature love says, 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says, 'I need you because I love you.'"
by Erich Fromm
"Immature love says 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'"
by Erich Fromm
"In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two."
by 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."
by Erich Fromm
"Man's main task is to give birth to himself."
by Erich Fromm
"Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is."
by 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."
by Erich Fromm
"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."
by Erich Fromm
"Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man."
by Erich Fromm
"Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream."
by 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."
by Erich Fromm
"The aim of sadism is to transform a man into a thng, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life-freedom."
by 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."
by Erich Fromm
"The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while ones own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standardevery action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve."
by 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."
by Erich Fromm
"The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have."
by 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."
by Erich Fromm
"There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives to his life by the unfolding of his powers."
by Erich Fromm
"There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding of his powers."
by Erich Fromm
"Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists.... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be incompleteness in absence."
by 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."
by 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"
by Erich Fromm
"By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts -- but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively."
by 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."
by 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."
by 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."
by 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."
by Erich Fromm
"The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become Golems, they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life."
by Erich Fromm
"Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man."
by Erich Fromm
"Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life."
by Erich Fromm
"The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind -- not the fiend or the sadist."
by Erich Fromm
"In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead."
by Erich Fromm
"What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal."
by Erich Fromm
"The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. 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."
by 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."
by Erich Fromm
"Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture."
by Erich Fromm


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