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
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
Topics: Self-Discovery, Birth, Potential, Personality
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
Topics: Romance
Love is an act of faith.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Romance
The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Attachment
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
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: Reason, Intelligence, Intellectuals
Man may be defined as the animal that can say “I,” that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Identity
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt
Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one’s identity.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Identity, Being Ourselves
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Assurance, Belief, Confidence, Faith
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
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Creativity
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, Gratitude, Appreciation, Defects, Blessings
Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Motherhood, Mothers
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
Even if man’s hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, ‘he’ is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Man, Mankind
Independent of others and in concert with others, your main task in life is to do what you can best do and become what you can potentially be.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Potential, Life, Best
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
Sanity: that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Sanity
Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Love
All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Ideals
That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.
—Erich Fromm
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
To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Death, Dying
You have to stop in order to change direction.
—Erich Fromm
The capacity to be puzzled is … the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Creativity
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
Topics: Consumerism
Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Society
One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one’s life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.
—Erich Fromm
Topics: Boredom
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Erik Erikson German-born American Psychoanalyst
- Albert Einstein German-born Theoretical Physicist
- Hannah Arendt German-American Political Theorist
- Moses Mendelssohn German Jewish Philosopher
- Abraham Maslow American Psychologist
- Berthold Auerbach German Novelist
- Carl Rogers American Psychologist
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe German Poet
- Howard Gardner American Psychologist
- Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi German Philosopher
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