Erich Fromm Quotes

In fifty years activity as an analyst I have witnessed again and again that a dreamer after having met a personage regarded by all as influential and good,saw him again in a dream with a different face.

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

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.

We talk about equality, about happiness, about freedom - and about the spiritual values of religion, and about God - and in our daily life, we act on principles which are different, and partly contradictory.

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.

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.

FORTITUDE IS THE CAPACITY TO SAY NO WHEN THE WORLD WANTS TO HEAR 'YES'

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.

[Sigmund ] Freud did not under-stand that the dream is a highly creative act, written in the universal language of symbolism, and only secondarily does censorship distort those parts that the subject refuses to accept even in sleep.

The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.

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

Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as love. Love is an abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self increasing.

The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life - freedom.

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.'

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.

Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you'll live as you've never lived before.

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

The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become ''Golems',' they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.

While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements.

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.

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 fact is that the culture does not have only positive effects on our intellectual and moral functions but also negative effects.

I think, to be specific, we got off the track when we concentrated more and more on production of things. Thereby, we created a split between intellect and emotion, because, in order to produce a modern technique, you have to use intellect, and we have created men who are very brilliant, who are very clever, but our emotional life has become impoverished.

Our vitality, and the vitality of each nation, rests on the sincerity and depth of the faith in the ideas which it announces, or pronounces.

Another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals, which they serve.

Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.

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

What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it requires the capacity to be puzzled. Children still have the capacity to be puzzled.

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

Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself.

The history of man so far is nothing to brag about, from the standpoint of our ideas - and what I mean is, that in comparison with most other societies, our present-day American society has achieved things which are remarkable: material wealth, greater than for any other nation; a relative freedom from oppression; a relative mobility; a spreading of art, of music, of thought, which is also rather unique.

Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality - or as one says sometimes, our "personality package" - for something.

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

There is only one reality: the act of feeling ourselves in the process of making choices.

In times of change, learners inherit the earth

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

If you take a salesman, who sells a useless commodity, he feels like a fraud.

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

[Carl Gustav] Jung was not right when he said that the unconscious message is always written clearly and so there is no need to seek to discover the distortions, because one must recognize that many dreams are more or less distortions.

Today, we talk a lot about equality, but I think what most people mean by it is sameness - that everybody is the same - and they are afraid if they are not the same, they are not equal.

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

To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.

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

Politics and religious leaders [are hindered] by their egotism.

In fact, there are very important writings of Marx which are not even translated into English.

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