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Erich Fromm QUOTES

Erich Fromm QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others. "

― Erich Fromm , Escape from Freedom

3 " 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. "

― Erich Fromm , To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche

4 " The 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. "

― Erich Fromm , Escape from Freedom

5 " The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die - although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born. "

― Erich Fromm , The Sane Society

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love. "

― Erich Fromm , The Art of Loving

9 " For despite what some people say, love is not only a sweet falling bound to come and quickly go away. "

― Erich Fromm

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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. "

― Erich Fromm , Escape from Freedom

13 " What is freedom as a human experience? Is the desire for freedom something inherent in human nature? Is it an identical experience regardless of what kind of culture a person lives in, or is it something different according to the degree of individualism reached in a particular society? Is freedom only the absence of external pressure or is it also the presence of something—and if so, of what? What are the social and economic factors in society that make for the striving for freedom? Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? Why then is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat? "

― Erich Fromm

14 " Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. "

― Erich Fromm

15 " The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. "

― Erich Fromm , The Sane Society

16 " The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man. "

― Erich Fromm , On Disobedience and Other Essays

17 " Man can attempt to become one with the world by submission to a person, to a group, to an institution, to God. In this way, he transcends the separateness of his individual existence by becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself, and experiences his identity in connection with the power to which he has submitted. "

― Erich Fromm , The Sane Society

18 " That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane. "

― Erich Fromm , The Sane Society

19 " Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, which are common to man, those drives which make for the differences in men's characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function - although it has that too - but it has also a creative function. "

― Erich Fromm , Escape from Freedom

20 " Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine. "

― Erich Fromm , Escape from Freedom