1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm photo

Erich Fromm Quotes

Total quotes: 18
“I cannot know who I am, because I don’t know which part of me is not me.”
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Being
Tagged: Identity, character, self
“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”
— Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
Tagged: Bad Habits, Sin, Greed, Selfish
“In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”
— Erich Fromm, The Erich Fromm Reader
Tagged: Love, Paradox, paradox of love
“Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'”
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Tagged: Love, romance, immature love vs. mature love
“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, The Art of Loving
Tagged: Love, Discipline, Obligation, Responsibility, Patience, Faith
“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”
— Erich Fromm, via Amazon
Tagged: Creativity, Courage, Certainties
“Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.”
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Tagged: Love, Art, love as an art, art and love, Love (The Concept)
“...love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence...”
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Tagged: Love, caring, Human Beauty, Unity, human unity, Life
“There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as ‘moral indignation,’ which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.”
— Erich Fromm, Doubling Down on Love | Brené Brown
Tagged: Love, Fear, News
“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.”
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Tagged: How To Love, Deep Insights, Love, self
“An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.”
— Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ: and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture
Tagged: illusion vs. reality, Reality, Illusion, Society, societal standards
“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.”
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Tagged: Christian Love
“Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be…Close your eyes let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.’”
— Erich Fromm, The Graduate's Handbook: Your No-Nonsense Guide for What Comes Next By Clark Gaither
Tagged: Journey, Living Abroad, Living Skills, Architecture Of Happiness, Technology of Wishing
“The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other.”
— Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
Tagged: Psychology, Philosophy, How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.’”
— Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
Tagged: Freedom, Neurosis, Psychologists, Psychology, Anthropology, Society, Life Is A Journey, Soul Searching
“What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other - but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness — of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other’s sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him.”
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Tagged: Unconditional Love, Generosity, Love, Life, sharing, Aliveness
“But a map is not enough as a guide for action; we also need a goal that tells us where to go. Animals have no such problems. Their instincts provide them with a map as well as with goals. But lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits us to think of many directions in which we can go, we need an object of total devotion, a focal point for all our strivings and the basis for all our effective - not only our proclaimed - values. We need such an object of devotion in order to integrate our energies in one direction, to transcend our isolated existence, with all its doubts and insecurities, and to answer our need for a meaning of life.”
— Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Philosophy, Psychology
“During the Second World War, psychologist Erich Fromm asked in Escape From Freedom why, despite an overarching trend toward greater personal freedom, large chunks of the western world had embraced authoritarianism. It was tempting, he argued, to consider this an aberration, the fault of a few madmen who ‘gained power over the vast apparatus of the state through nothing but cunning and trickery,’ and who rendered their constituents ‘the will-less object of betrayal and terror.’ But Fromm argued against this attempt to shift blame. There was something inherent in humanity that feared true freedom, that preferred to be dominated. In other words, Fromm thought this was a feature of human nature, not a bug.
To explain this tendency, Fromm distinguished between two kinds of freedom: negative freedom, casting off the shackles of social, political, and cultural restrictions; and positive freedom, finding a truer expression of self and identity. When the former occurs without the latter, he wrote, ‘the newly won freedom appears as a curse; [mankind] is free from the sweet bondage of paradise, but he is not free to govern himself, to realize his individuality.’
This distinction might sound familiar to students of the Iraq War and the Arab Spring—when dictators, toppled in the name of ‘freedom,’ gave way to chaos, power vacuums and warlordism. It also might help explain Trump’s ascendance. In casting off many of the middlemen, sclerotic corporations, and bureaucracies that throttled human accomplishment, people have achieved negative freedom. But without the tools or power to forge a more meaningful society—a positive freedom—some have plunged back into the comforts of authoritarianism and domination.”
— Jason Tanz, Erich Fromm, How Silicon Valley Utopianism Brought You the Dystopian Trump Presidency
Tagged: Trump, Authoritarianism, Freedom, Negative And Positive Freedom
loading next page...