Erich Fromm Quotes

Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.

While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person.

Love is a power which produces love.

I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.

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.

We are concerned with things. We are concerned with success. We are concerned with money. We are concerned with instrumentalities.

According to me [Sigmund ] Freud did not notice that the dream expresses the inner experiences in a symbolic form,resembling in that, poetry or other art forms.

It doesn't matter whether one uses God or doesn't. What matters is which experience a person has.

The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula "I am we"; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an "individual," existing apart from his group.

Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself.

Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.

Mobilizing the love of life is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead.

Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.

You have to stop to change direction.

In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue.

The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it

The most important things we talk about on Sundays are things to which we pay very little attention.

I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion.

What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.

What is common to our societies is the development into a managed mass society, with big bureaucracy, managing people. The Russians do it by force. We do it by persuasion.

I want to mention that Marx shares something, if you don't mind the comparison, with the Old Testament: many people talk about him, but nobody has read him.

What we have in common is a mass men, a mass bureaucracy, and a manipulation of everyone to act smoothly, but with the illusion that he follows his own decisions and opinions.

Man can only know the nagation, never the position of ultimate reality.

I think if you ask what people really mean by happiness today, it is the experience of unlimited consumption - the kind of thing Mr. Huxley described in "Brave New World."

I would say, compared with the 19th century, compared with most previous history, this is as good or better a society than any which man has ever made. But that doesn't mean it is such a good one.

Death is never sweet, not even if it is suffered for the highest ideal.

On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man's need for collective art and ritual.

Happiness today, I think, is for most people the satisfaction of the eternal suckling: to drink in more this, that, or the other.

If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love.

Many students of dreams, from Plato to [Sigmund] Freud, hold that the sleeping person,deprived of contact with the outside world, regresses temporarily to an irrational primitive mental state.

The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.

Finally one arrives at this: the state of sleep has an ambiguous function; in sleep, the lack of contact with the culture brings out the worst and also the best in us.

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

In the sleeping state, instead, one is much more oneself, even if society never ceases to intervene.

The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.

The average American has separated his private life from his existence as a member of his society, and leaves that to the specialists in the government to take care of.

The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.

Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.

That is not quite enough to make one happy, if one spends eight hours a day in something which in itself has no meaning and interest, except that one gains money from it.

Jewish legend says that the world rests on 36 just men: only thirty six, but their moral strength is immense.

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

The individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making.

Actually, if you take the average American, and studies have shown that, he is really concerned only with private affairs; that is to say, with his health, his money and family affairs.

The average American is not concerned with his society. He talks about it, but you know if one speaks of being concerned, I mean something about which one loses one's sleep, sometimes.

We are all equal in the sense that no man must mean - must be - the means for the purposes of another man; but each individual is an end in itself.

By equality, one once understood equality in the very same sense in which the Bible speaks of equality: that we are all equal, inasmuch as we are created in the image of God.

I think the Russians might do away with the terror in twenty or thirty or years, when they are richer, and when they don't need these repressive methods so much.

Ger-mans love the ambiguous word, verbal assonances as ends in themselves,vague concepts. Anglosaxons are more clear.

Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.

I would consider a socialism a mixture of the minimum of centralization necessary for a modern industrial state, and a maximum of decentralization.