Erich Fromm Quotes

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

Capitalism puts things (capital) higher than life (labor). Power follows from possession, not from activity.

The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things.

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death.

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.

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

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.

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'

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

The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.

The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.

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.

They were more free, but they were more alone.

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

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

Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology.

Man is the only animal that can be bored.

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

Immature love says "I love you because I need you." Mature love says "I need you because I love you."

A society whose members are helpless need idols.

Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity.

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?

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.

Love is a power which produces love.

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

Equality today means "sameness" rather than "oneness".

Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.

We are what we do.

The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life.

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.

They have their big, ever-changing egos, but none has a self, a core, a sense of identity.

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.

Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man by necessity uncertain.

Giving is the highest expression of potency.

Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man is by necessity uncertain.

Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine.

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

Man absolutely cannot live by himself.

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.

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.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.

Immature loves says ' I love because I need you. Mature love says I need you because I love you.

There is only one meaning of life the act of living itself.

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

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.

Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown.

For despite what some people say, love is not only a sweet falling bound to come and quickly go away.