Erich Seligmann Fromm was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the US. He was a social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. This Erich Fromm quotes on love, society will motivate you.
Best Erich Fromm Quotes
- “Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being ‘asocial’ or ‘irrational’ in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.” ~ Erich Fromm
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“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” ~ 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
- “To love somebody is not just a strong feeling – it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.” ~ Erich Fromm, Erich Fromm quotes on love
- “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
- “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.” ~ Erich Fromm
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“An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “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.” ~ Erich Fromm Quotes
- “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
- “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.'” ~ Erich Fromm
- “You have to stop in order to change direction.” ~ Erich Fromm
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“When people can’t handle God any more, they turn to religion.” ~ 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
- “Alienation, as we find it in modern society, is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “Every act of irreverence for life, every act which neglects life, which is indifferent to and wastes life, is a step towards the love of death. This choice man must make at every minute. Never were the consequences of the wrong choice as total and as irreversible as they are today. Never was the warning of the Bible so urgent: ‘I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live.'” ~ Erich Fromm
- “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
- “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” ~ 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
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“Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.” ~ 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
- “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
- “The deepest need of the human being is to overcome our
separateness, to leave the prison of our loneliness.” ~ Erich Fromm - “To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.” ~ Erich Fromm
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“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.” ~ 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 affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one’s capacity to love.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.” ~ 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
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“Equality today means ‘sameness’, rather than ‘oneness’.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “Well-being is possible to the degree to which one has overcome one’s narcissism; to the degree to which one is open, responsive, sensitive, awake, empty…. Well-being means, finally, to drop one’s Ego, to give up greed, to cease chasing after preservation and the aggrandizement of the Ego, to be and to experience one’s self in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “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
- “We try to evade the question of existence with property, prestige, power, possession, production, fun, and, ultimately, by trying to forget that we- that I- exist. No matter how much he thinks of God or goes to church, or how much he believes in religious ideas, if he, the whole man, is deaf to the question of existence, if he does not have an answer to it, he is marking time, and he lives and dies like one of the million things he produces. He thinks of God, instead of experiencing God.” ~ 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
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“There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “Integrity simply means not violating one’s own identity.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the “growth” of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence. Love is a productive orientation for which it is essential that there be present at the same time: concern, responsibility, and respect for and knowledge of the object of the union.” ~ 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
