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Erich Fromm Quotes

Total quotes: 9
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
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