Erich Fromm Quotes

Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the world - a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening world. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety. These feelings must be alleviated if the individual is to function successfully.

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

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.

The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most.

The hoarders, who are anxiously worried about losing something, are, psychologically speaking, the poor impoverished people, regardless of how much they have. Whoever is capable of giving of themselves is rich.

There is no word in our language which has been so much misused and prostituted as the word love. It has been preached by those who were ready to condone every cruelty if it served their purpose; it has been used as a disguise under which to force people into sacrificing their own happiness, into submitting their whole self to those who profited from this surrender. [ ... ] It has been made so empty that for many people love may mean no more than that two people have lived together for twenty years just without fighting more often than once a week.

Society, and the family as its psycho social agent, has to solve a difficult problem: How to break a person's will without his being aware of it? Yet by a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology, it solves this task by and large so well that most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated.

[ ... ]The more man gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an 'individual,' he has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world that destroys his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.

FORTITUDE IS THE CAPACITY TO SAY NO WHEN THE WORLD WANTS TO HEAR 'YES'

If I am nothing but what I believe I am supposed to be - who am "I"?

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.

The newspapers, the magazines, television, and radio produce a commodity: news, from the raw material of events. Only news is salable, and the news media determine which events are news, which are not.

It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.

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.

To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death.

Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has
been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not
grown.

I believe that none can "save" his fellow man by making a choice for him. To help him, he can indicate the possible alternatives, with sincerity and love, without being sentimental and
without illusion.

The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense of life.

We may know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts we make, we do not know ourselves. We know our fellowman, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellowman is not a thing. The further we reach into the depths of our being, on someone else's being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us.

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.

The human desire to experience union with others is rooted in the specific conditions of existence that characterize the human species and is one of the strongest motivators of human behavior.

The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.

The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity, because the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such a radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling of separation disappears - because the world outside, from which one is separated, has disappeared.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

The fact that millions of people take part in a delusion doesn't make it sane.

Education is helping the child realise his potentialities.

Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life.

Why should anyone be so grateful for acceptance unless he doubts that he is acceptable, and why should a young, educated and successful couple have such doubts, if not due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves because they are not themselves.

Man unites himself with the world in the process of creation.

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as
drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.

Nature is the great power we have to submit to, but living beings are the ones we should dominate.

Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled, to concentrate, to accept conflict and tension, to be born every day, to feel a sense of self.

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.

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

Aliveness always makes a beautiful.

On whom am I dependent? What are my main fears? Who was I meant to be at birth? What were my goals and how did they change? What were the forks of the road where I took the wrong direction and went the wrong way? What efforts did I make to correct the error and return to the right way? Who am I now, and who would I be if I had always made the right decisions and avoided crucial errors? Whom did I want to be long ago, now, and in the future? What is my image of myself? What is the image I wish others to have of me? Where are the discrepancies between the two images, both between themselves and with what I sense in my real self? Who will I be if I continue to live as I am living now? What are the conditions responsible for the development as it happened? What are the alternatives for further development open to me now? What must I do to realize the possibility I choose?

If we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals ... We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities.

Love is hot a higher power which descends upon mn nor a duty which is imposed upon him; it is his own power by which he relates himself to the world and makes it truly his.

Human beings had two basic orientations: HAVING and BEING
HAVING: seeks to acquire, posses things even people
BEING: focuses on the experience; exchanging, engaging, sharing with other people

The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.

Indeed, with the experience of self disappears the experience of identity - and when this happens, man could become insane if he did not save himself by acquiring a secondary sense of self; he does that by experiencing himself as being approved of, worthwhile, successful, useful - briefly, as a salable commodity which is he because he is looked upon by others as an entity, not unique but fitting into one of the current patterns.

If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself, too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.

The outer chains have simply been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains.

The need for profound human change emerges not only as an ethical or religious demand, not only as a psychological demand arising from the pathogenic nature of our present social character, but also as a condition for the sheer survival of the human race. Right living is no longer only the fulfillment of an ethical or religious demand. For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart. However, a change of the human heart is possible only to the extent that drastic economic and social changes occur that give the human heart the chance for change and the courage and the vision to achieve it.

Authority does not have to be a person or institution which says: you have to do this, or you are not allowed to do that. While this kind of authority may be called external authority, authority can appear as internal authority, under the name of duty, conscience, or super-ego. As a matter of fact, the development of modern thinking from Protestantism to Kant's philosophy, can be characterized as the substitution of internalized authority for an external one. With the political victories of the rising middle class, external authority lost prestige and man's own conscience assumed the place which external authority once had held. This change appeared to many as the victory of freedom. To submit to orders from the outside (at least in spiritual matters) appeared to be unworthy of a free man; but the conquest of his natural inclinations, and the establishment of the domination of one part of the individual, his nature, by another, his reason, will or conscience, seemed to be the very essence of freedom. Analysis shows that conscience rules with a harshness as great as external authorities, and furthermore that frequently the contents of the orders issued by man's conscience are ultimately not governed by demands of the individual self but by social demands which have assumed the dignity of ethical norms. The rulership of conscience can be even harsher than that of external authorities, since the individual feels its orders to be his own; how can he rebel against himself?
In

Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.

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.

It is essential ... that discipline should not be practised like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one's own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behaviour which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practising it.

Whether a carpenter makes a table, or a goldsmith a piece of jewelry, whether the peasant grows his corn, or the painter paints a picture, in all types of creative work the worker and his object become one, man unites himself with the world in the process of creation. This, however, holds true only for productive work, for work in which I plan, produce, see the result of my work. In the modern work process of a clerk, the worker on the endless

They have their big, ever-changing egos, but none has a self, a core, a sense of identity.

The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.

While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person.

We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.

The confusion between temperament and character has had serious consequences for ethical theory. Preferences with regard to differences in temperament are mere matters of subjective taste.
But differences in character are ethically of the most fundamental importance.

Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.

The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world. The consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle.

If one candle is brought into an absolutely dark room, the darkness disappears, and there is light. But if ten or a hundred or a thousand candles are added, the room will become brighter and brighter. Yet the decisive change was brought about by the first candle which penetrated the darkness.57

In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.

The assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object , not the problem of a faculty . People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love - or to be loved by- is difficult.

I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is
death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought.

I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is, they would say, if they are honest, that it is a big department store, with new things every week - all the money to buy them, and maybe a little more than the neighbours.

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

One can hardly overestimate people's need to talk about themselves and to be listened to.

You have to stop in order to change direction.

Productive work, love and thought are possible only if a person can be, when necessary, quiet and alone. To be able to listen to oneself is the necessary condition for relating oneself to others.

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.

Women are equal because they are not different any more.

If we mean by love the passionate affirmation and active relatedness to the esssence of a particular person, if we mean by it the union with another person on the basis of the independence and integrity of the two persons involved, then masochism and love are opposites. Love is based on equality and freedom. If it is based on subordination and loss of integrity of one partner, it is masochistic dependence regardless of how the relationship is rationalized. Sadism also appears frequently under the disguise of love. To rule over another person, if one can claim that to rule him is for that person's own sake, frequently appears as an expression of love, but the essential factor is the enjoyment of domination.

When people can't handle God any more, they turn to religion.

Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.

When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.

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

When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.

The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs ... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.

The only way of full knowledge lies in the act of love; this act transcends thought, it transcends words. It is the daring plunge into the experience of union.

It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group.

If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use. Respect thus implies the absence of exploitation: it allows the other to be, to change and to develop 'in his own ways.' This requires a commitment to know the other as a separate being, and not merely as a reflection of my own ego. According to Velleman this loving willingness and ability to see the other as they really are is foregrounded in our willingness to risk self-exposure.

Inasmuch as one cannot avoid bad company, one should not be deceived. One should see the insincerity behind the mask of friendliness, the destructiveness behind the mask of eternal complaints about unhappiness. The narcissism behind the charm. One should also not act if he or she were taken in by the others deceptive appearance in order to avoid being forced into a certain dishonesty oneself. One need not speak to them about what one sees, but one should not attempt to convince them that one is blind.

Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use. It is clear that respect is possible only if I have achieved independence; if I can stand and walk without needing crutches, without

[T]he development of man's intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man's brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.

Freedom does not mean license.

this absolute power of God over man is counterbalanced by the idea that man is God's potential rival.

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.

The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced
by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.

The full humanization of man requires the breakthrough from the possession-centered to the activity-centered orientation, from selfishness and egotism to solidarity and altruism.

Man is the only animal that can be bored.

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.

Man today is fascinated by the possibility of buying, more, better, and especially, new things. He is consumption hungry ... To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite secondary. Modern man, if the dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world ...

What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make seek answers in certain directions. Any kind of though, true or false, is motivated by the subjective needs and interests of the person who is thinking. It happens that some interests are furthered by finding the truth, others by destroying it.

The myth identifies the beginning of human history with an act of choice, but it puts all emphasis on the sinfulness of this first act of freedom and the suffering resulting from it. Man and woman live in the Garden of Eden in complete harmony with each other and with nature. There is peace and no necessity to work; there is no choice, no freedom, no thinking either, Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against God's command, he breaks through the state of harmony with nature of which he is a part without transcending it. From the standpoint of the Church which represented authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom. Acting against God's orders means freeing himself from coercion, emerging from the unconscious existence of prehuman life to the level of man. Acting against the command of authority, committing a sin, is in its positive human aspect the first act of freedom, that is, the first human act. In the myth the sin in its formal aspect is the acting against God's command; in its material aspect it is the eating of the tree of knowledge. The act of disobedience as an act of freedom is the beginning of reason. The myth speaks of other consequences of the first act of freedom. The original harmony between man and nature is broken. God proclaims war between man and woman, and war between nature and man, Man has become separate from nature, he has taken the first step

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

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

One concept of activity, the modern one, refers to the use of energy for the achievement of external aims; the other concept of activity refers to the use of man's inherent powers, regardless of whether any external change is brought about.

I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If

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

Millions are impressed by the victories of power and take it for the sign of strength. To be sure, power over people is an expression of superior strength in a purely material sense. If I have the power over another person to kill him, I am "stronger" than he is. But in a psychological sense, the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of inability of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.

If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either.

Only in the love of those who do not serve a purpose, love begins to unfold.