Erich Fromm Quotes

1900-1980, American Psychologist
quotes
33
topics
12
Origin
What do these mean?
Topic
“Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.”
Charity
“Integrity simple means not violating one's own identity.”
Integrity
“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”
Creativity
“If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?”
Possessions
“Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.”
VerifiedEscape from Freedom (1941) · evidenceWeakness
“Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.”
VerifiedMan for Himself (1947) · evidenceFaith
“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
VerifiedThe Art of Loving (1956) · evidenceLove
“Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”
VerifiedMan for Himself (1947) · evidenceExistence
“Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.”
Creativity
“There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding of his powers.”
Purpose
“To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”
VerifiedMan for Himself (1947) · evidenceDeath and Dying
“The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.”
Security
“Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.”
Identity
“The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind -- not the fiend or the sadist.”
Power
“Immature love says: ''I love you because I need you.'' Mature love says: ''I need you because I love you.''”
VerifiedThe Art of Loving (1956) · evidenceLove
“We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”
Materialism
“In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”
Present
“What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.”
VerifiedThe Art of Loving (1956) · evidencePopularity
“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”
VerifiedMan for Himself (1947) · evidenceUncertainty
“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”
VerifiedEscape from Freedom (1941) · evidenceGreed
“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.”
VerifiedMan for Himself (1947) · evidenceBirth
“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.”
VerifiedEscape from Freedom (1941) · evidenceInvolvement
“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.”
Time and Time Management
“Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.”
Love
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
VerifiedThe Art of Loving (1956) · evidenceEquality
“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.”
Reason
“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.”
Authority
“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become ''Golems,'' they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.”
Future
“Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. 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.”
Intelligence and Intellectuals