Erich Fromm Quotes (84 Quotes)

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

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

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own.

Socialism is the abolition of human self-alienation, the return of man as a real human being.

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.

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

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

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

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.

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.

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

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

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

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.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

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.

The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into an individual one potentially is.

Men are born equal but they are also born different

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.

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.

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.

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

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

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.

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

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.

Women are equal because they are not different any more

Happiness is a mans greatest achievement it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside.

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ''Patriotism'' is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by ''patriotism'' I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare --never with its power over other nations. 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.

Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.