110+ Erich Fromm Quotes On Freedom, Psychoanalytic And Humanistic

Erich Fromm was an American Psychologist who was known for his work in psychoanalytic theory, social psychology, and humanistic philosophy. He was a major proponent of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and wrote extensively on topics such as authority, freedom, human nature, and love. Fromm's works include Escape from Freedom, The Art of Loving, and The Sane Society. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Erich Fromm on love, freedom, life.

Top 10 Erich Fromm Quotes

1. Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
2. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
3. It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.
4. Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
5. Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
9. The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• I need you because I love you.
• Giving is the highest expression of potency.
• Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
• The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
• If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
• Integrity simple means not violating one's own identity.
• Love is an act of faith.
• In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
• Intellectuals are hindered on the way to being, by their narcissism.
• Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you'll live as you've never lived before.

Erich Fromm Quotes About Love

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

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

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

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. — Erich Fromm

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. — Erich Fromm

True love is like a pair of socks: you gotta have two and they've gotta match. — Erich Fromm

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. — 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

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

The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love. — Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm Quotes About Freedom

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

The state of sleep is a state of freedom in which man is not occupied with the manipulation of the outside world. — Erich Fromm

We talk about equality, about happiness, about freedom - and about the spiritual values of religion, and about God - and in our daily life, we act on principles which are different, and partly contradictory. — Erich Fromm

Love is the child of freedom, never that of domination. — 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

For [Karl] Marx it is socialist society which realizes "concretely" the religious principles of equality, brotherly love, and freedom. — Erich Fromm

Freedom does not mean license. — Erich Fromm

Freedom is the fundamental condition for any growth. — Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm Quotes About Life

Happiness does not exclude sadness - if a person responds to life, he's sometimes happy and sometimes sad. What matters is he responds. — 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

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

Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love. — 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. — Erich Fromm

For the most part, biophiliacs,lovers of life, are found among simple people, without pretensions. — Erich Fromm

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself. — Erich Fromm

Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. — Erich Fromm

To take the difficulties, setbacks and sorrows of life as a challenge to overcome makes us stronger, rather than unjust punishment which should not happen to us, requires faith and courage. — Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm Quotes About Humanistic

I would define myself as a Marxian, and that means of course also as a humanist. — 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

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

Erich Fromm Quotes About Social

As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask. — 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 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

Society must be organized in such a way that mans social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. — Erich Fromm

Men are born equal but they are also born different. — Erich Fromm

I would say our social relationships are relatively shallow. We are actually afraid to be intimate, with people - many people even with their wives and husbands. — Erich Fromm

The criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one, valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. — 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

I am a socialist. However, I have to add that what I understand by socialism is exactly the opposite of what many people, or most people, today mean by socialism. — Erich Fromm

The Russians have succeeded in one thing: they have sold the world the idea that they represent socialism and the ideas of Marx,and we have done the greatest service to their propaganda by agreeing that that's what it is. — Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm Quotes About World

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

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

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. — Erich Fromm

FORTITUDE IS THE CAPACITY TO SAY NO WHEN THE WORLD WANTS TO HEAR 'YES' — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Erich Fromm Quotes About Person

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

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others. — 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

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

The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy. — 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

The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person and him of great joy is the difference between get and give. — Erich Fromm

The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile. — 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

To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. — Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm Quotes About Born

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies. — 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

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

To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops. — Erich Fromm

Man always dies before he is fully born. — 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

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

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

Erich Fromm Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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. — 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

True love is like a pair of socks: you gotta have two and they've gotta match. — Erich Fromm

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. — Erich Fromm

If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences,that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, i perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood. This relatedness from center to center - instead of that from periphery to periphery - is 'central relatedness'. — 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

It is time to cease to argue about God , and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry. — Erich Fromm

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable. — 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

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

A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism. — 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 danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots. — Erich Fromm

The deepest need of the human being is to overcome our separateness, to leave the prison of our loneliness. — Erich Fromm

If the handbag could think, it would have a terrific inferiority feeling, because, not having been bought, it would feel useless. — 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

Organized religion is in substance a mystification, a means of hiding the wickedness of the social system. If the Christian principles of love, equality, and freedom were really practiced instead of only preached, there would be no need for a special institution(the church) to take care of those principles. — Erich Fromm

We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization. — Erich Fromm

Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities and the connection that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable. — 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

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

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? — 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 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

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

Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness. — Erich Fromm

We may know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts we make, we do not know ourselves. We know our fellowman, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellowman is not a thing. The further we reach into the depths of our being, on someone else's being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us. — 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

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

Man is the only animal that can be bored. — Erich Fromm

A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul. — 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

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much. — Erich Fromm

Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. — Erich Fromm

Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity. — 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

In times of change, learners inherit the earth — 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

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 experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. — Erich Fromm

I think what democracy means today, in reality, is to a large extent, manipulated consent - not forced consent, manipulated consent - and manipulated more and more with the help of Madison Avenue. — Erich Fromm

There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group. — Erich Fromm

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable. — Erich Fromm

When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism. — 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

For [Karl] Marx what counts is man. He is the root of everything;while for capitalism, the aim are things, profit, and man is only a means to gain them. As an authentically religious individual, Marx could not be other than against "religion". — 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

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

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

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

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have. — Erich Fromm

Equality today means ‘sameness’, rather than ‘oneness’. — 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. To love somebody is not just a strong feeling-it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. — Erich Fromm

Creativity is the ability to see and to respond. — 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

Life Lessons by Erich Fromm

1. Erich Fromm's work emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and understanding of our own motivations in order to lead a fulfilling life.
2. He believed that our choices should be based on our own values and beliefs, rather than those of society, and that we should strive for a balance between our individual needs and the needs of others.
3. He also advocated for a society that promotes freedom, justice, and equality, and warned against the dangers of conformity and consumerism.