Erich Fromm Quotes

Happiness should be something which results from the creative, genuine, intense relatedness - awareness, responsiveness, to everything in life - to man, to nature.

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

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

Creativity is the ability to see and to respond.

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

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.

People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love - or to be loved by - is difficult.

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

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.

Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution.

Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.

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

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

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.

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.

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.

Men are born equal but they are also born different.

Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.

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.

Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.

Mother is the home we come from. She is nature, soil, ocean.

The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology.

Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.

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

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.

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

I would say democracy once meant an organizational society and a state, in which the individual citizen is - feels - responsible, and acts responsibly, and participates in decision-making.

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

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

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.

Greedhas no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.

If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

Freedom does not mean license.

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.

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

Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.

Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.

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.

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.

In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.

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