Erich Fromm ...

«Today we come across an INDIVIDUAL  who behaves like an  AUTOMATON, WHO DOES NOT KNOW OR UNDERSTAND HIMSELF,  and the only person that he knos is the person  that he is supposed to be, whose  MEANINGLESS CHATTER has replaced communcative speech, whose SYNTHETIC SMILE  has replaced genuine laughter, and whose SENSE OF DULL DESPAIR  has taken the place of genuine pain.  TWO STATEMENTS MAY BE SAID CONCERNING THIS INDIVIDUAL . ONE IS THAT HE SUFFERS FROM DEFECTS OF SPONTANEITY AND INDIVIDUALITY WHICH MAY SEEM TO BE INCURABLE . AT THE SAME TIME IT MAY BE SAID OF HIM HE DOES NOT DIFFER ESSENTIALLY FROM THE MILLIONS OF THE REST OF US WHO WALK UPON THIS EARTH ...»

“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

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

“Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.”

“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love”
― Erich Fromm

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”
― 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, The Art of Loving

 “It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.”
― 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. How many lives have been ruined by this need to "explain," which usually implies that the explanation be "understood," i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Being

“Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”
― Erich Fromm

“Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our
insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult... Just as love for one
individual which excludes the love for others is not love,
love for one's country which is not part of one's love
for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”
― Erich Fromm

 “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
― 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

 “Man’s main task is to give birth to himself. ”
― Erich Fromm

 “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. ”
― Erich Fromm

 “Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.»
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

 “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

 “Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either "have" or "have not." In fact, there is no such thing as "freedom" except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life.”
― Erich Fromm, El corazon del hombre: su potencia para el bien y para el mal

 “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

 “Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.”
― Erich Fromm

“Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.”
― Erich Fromm

 “To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”
― Erich Fromm

 “Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.”
― Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche

 “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

 “Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.”
― Erich Fromm

 “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

 “There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.”
― Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis And Religion

 “Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies”
― Erich Fromm

has no satiation point, since its consummation does¼“Greed not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.”
― Erich Fromm

 “The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.”
― Erich Fromm

 “The mature response to the problem of existence is love.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

 “That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
― Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

 “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.”
― Erich Fromm, El corazon del hombre: su potencia para el bien y para el mal

 “The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

 “The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.”
― Erich Fromm

 “Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

 “Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.”
― Erich Fromm

 “. . . freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.”
― Erich Fromm, El corazon del hombre: su potencia para el bien y para el mal

 “Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality. ”
― Erich Fromm

 “Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, in as much as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.”
― Erich Fromm

 “In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”
― Erich Fromm

 “Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life”
― Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

 “Freedom does not mean license.”
― Erich Fromm

 “If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.”
― Erich Fromm, Man For Himself: An Inquiry Into The Psychology Of Ethics

 “There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feelings as “moral indignation,” which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue. The “indignant” person has for once the satisfaction of despising and treating a creature as “inferior,” coupled with the feeling of his own superiority and rightness.”
― Erich Fromm

 “...in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.
Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which "only" profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend energy on?”
― Erich Fromm

 “We should free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same “common sense.” Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human. True compassion and knowledge of man has been largely underrated as a revolutionary factor in the development of man, just as art has been. It is a noteworthy phenomenon that in the development of capitalism and its ethics, compassion (or mercy) ceases to be a virtue.”
― Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology

Ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“La raison découle du mélange de la pensée rationnelle et des sentiments. Si les deux fonctions se dissocient, la pensée se détériore en activité intellectuelle schizoïde et les sentiments en passions névrotiques autodestructrices.”
― Erich Fromm

 “The source of irrational authority, on the other hand, is always power over people. This power can be physical or mental, it can be realistic or only relative in terms of the anxiety and helplessness of the person submitting to this authority. Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built. Criticism of the authority is not only required but forbidden. Rational authority is based upon the equality of both authority and subject, which differ only with respect to the degree of knowledge of skill in a particular field. Irrational authority is by its very nature based on inequality, implying difference in value.”
― Erich Fromm, Man For Himself: An Inquiry Into The Psychology Of Ethics

 “To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness”
― Erich Fromm

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
Erich Fromm

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
Erich Fromm

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

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self. Erich Fromm
Man always dies before he is fully born.  Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

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

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. Erich Fromm

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others. Erich Fromm
Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought. Erich Fromm
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. Erich Fromm
The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science. 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 most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. 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

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have. Erich Fromm
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist. Erich Fromm
The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. Erich Fromm
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. Erich Fromm
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal. Erich Fromm
The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. Erich Fromm
There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail. Erich Fromm
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love. Erich Fromm
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers. Erich Fromm
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself. Erich Fromm

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue. Erich Fromm
To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable. Erich Fromm
To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime. Erich Fromm
We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake. Erich Fromm
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them. Erich Fromm
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal. Erich Fromm
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. Erich Fromm
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? Erich Fromm