Erich Fromm (1900–80) was a German-born American psychoanalyst, social philosopher, and author. He applied psychoanalysis to the study of peoples and cultures with an emphasis on the importance of interpersonal relationships in an impersonal, industrialized society.
Born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Fromm was educated at the universities of Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Munich, and the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis. He immigrated to America in 1934, and, after maintaining numerous university assignments, became a professor at New York in 1962. He later expanded his views to integrate some of the principles of Zen Buddhism.
Fromm emphasized social, economic, and cultural factors on human behavior. He wrote extensively—for both the academic and the general reader—on topics ranging from sociology, anthropology, and ethics to religion, politics, and mythology. His works include Escape from Freedom (1941,) Man for Himself (1947,) Psychoanalysis and Religion (1951,) The Sane Society (1955,) Sigmund Freud’s Mission (1959,) and The Heart of Man (1964.)
Among Fromm’s other books are The Art of Loving (1956,) May Man Prevail? (1961; with D. T. Suzuki and Richard Dimartino,) Beyond the Chains of Illusion (1962,) The Revolution of Hope (1968,) and The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970.)
Fromm’s later work included The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973,) which developed his examination of human aggression.
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Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Intellectuals, Reason, Intelligence
Human history begins with man’s act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Reason
Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Reason
Let your mind start a journey thru 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
I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Boredom
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Education
Authority is not a quality one person “has,” in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Control, Authority
The capacity to be puzzled is … the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Creativity
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.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Time, Time Management, Value of Time
A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Dreams
By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts—but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively.
—Erich Fromm
Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Authority
As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found—in himself.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Discovery
There is only one meaning of life, the act of living itself.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Simple Living, Goals, Simplicity, Aspirations
To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Dying, Death
Free man is by necessity insecure; thinking man by necessity uncertain.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Realistic Expectations, Acceptance, Doubt, Uncertainty
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Revolution, Revolutions, Revolutionaries
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Greed, Blessings, Defects, Appreciation, Gratitude
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
Topics: Equality
In the sphere of material things, giving means being rich. Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Sacrifice, Charity, Giving, Wealth
Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Motherhood, Mothers
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind—not the fiend or the sadist.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Power
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Popularity
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
Topics: Grief
Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Nationalism
Man is the only animal that can be bored.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Boredom
Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative 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.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Despair, Individuality, Laughter, Rest, Smile, Earth, Pain
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: The Present, Present
If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Possessions, Property
Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one’s identity.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Being Ourselves, Identity
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