Erich Fromm, a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher, fused Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist theory to develop a unique perspective on human nature and society. Departing from Freud’s emphasis on biological determinism, Fromm integrated Marx’s notion of societal influence on individuals. He believed that human behavior and character were shaped by both internal psychological forces and external social and economic structures. Fromm’s work explored the interplay between psychology and society, advocating for a more humanistic and democratic approach to understanding human nature and addressing social issues. His ideas contributed to the development of critical theory and had a significant impact on fields such as sociology and psychology.

Erich Fromm Quotes

01. “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

02. “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.”
― Erich fromm

03. “Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.”
― Fromm, Eric

04. “If other people do not understand our behavior—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being “asocial” or “irrational” in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to “explain,” which usually implies that the explanation be “understood,” i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.”
― Erich Fromm

05. “Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.”
― Erich Fromm

06. “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.”
― Erich Fromm

07. “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”
― Erich Fromm

08. “The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.”
― Erich Fromm

09. “That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
― Erich Fromm

10. “Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty.”
― Erich Fromm

11. “If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.”
― Erich Fromm

12. “One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”
― Erich Fromm

13. “Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”
― Erich Fromm

14. “Infantile love follows the principle: “I love because I am loved.”
Mature love follows the principle: “I am loved because I love.”
Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.”
Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”
― Erich Fromm

15. “There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as ‘moral indignation,’ which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.”
― Erich Fromm

16. “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
― Erich Fromm

17. “Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.p97.”
― Erich Fromm

18. “Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”
― Erich Fromm

19. “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

20. “It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.”
― Erich Fromm

21. “What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other—but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness—of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other’s sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him.”
― Erich Fromm

22. “Man’s main task is to give birth to himself. ”
― Erich Fromm

23. “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. ”
― Erich Fromm

24. “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

25. “The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one’s reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason.
I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person’s reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.”
― Erich Fromm

26. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

27. “The mature response to the problem of existence is love.”
― Erich Fromm

28. “To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.”
― Erich Fromm

29. “The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.”
― Erich Fromm

30. “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

31. “Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.”
― Erich Fromm

32. “To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”
― Erich Fromm

33. “Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.”
― Erich Fromm

34. “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

35. “The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.”
― Erich Fromm

36. “Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.”
― Erich Fromm

37. “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

38. “If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?
Nobody but a defeated, deflated, pathetic testimony to a wrong way of living.”
― Erich Fromm

39. “Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies”
― Erich Fromm

40. “Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either “have” or “have not.” In fact, there is no such thing as “freedom” except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life.”
― Erich Fromm

41. “Modern capitalism needs men who co-operate smoothly, and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience—yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead. What is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature.”
― Erich Fromm

42. “We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what “he” thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally – that is, for himself – which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts.”
― Erich Fromm

43. “Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance, albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.”
― Erich Fromm

44. “There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.”
― Erich Fromm

45. “In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”
― Erich Fromm

46. “People do not see that the main question is not : “Am I loved?” which is to a large extent the question : “Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?” The main question is: “Can I love?”
― Erich Fromm

47. “Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved , rather than that of loving , of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable. In pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. One, which is especially used by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of one’s position permits. Another, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating one’s body, dress, etc. …. Many of the ways to make oneself lovable are the same as those used to make oneself successful, to ‘win friends and influence people’. As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.”
― Erich Fromm

48. “Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.”
― Erich Fromm

49. “Man’s happiness today consists in “having fun.” Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and “taking in” commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones.”
― Erich Fromm

50. “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

51. “Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence. Only in this “central experience” is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love. Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized.”
― Erich Fromm

52. “إن معظم الناس مقتنعون بأنه طالما أنهم ليسوا مضطرين صراحة إلى عمل شيء بسبب قوة خارجية، فإن قراراتهم هي قراراتهم وأنهم إذا أرادوا شيئا فانهم هم الذين يريدونه. ولكن هذا هو أحد الأوهام الكبرى التي لدينا عن أنفسنا. إن عددا كبيرا من قراراتنا ليست حقا قراراتنا، بل أوحى بها لنا من الخارج، لقد نجحنا في اقناع أنفسنا بأننا نحن الذين نصنع القرار بينما نحن في الحقيقة نتطابق مع توقعات الآخرين مساقين بالخوف من العزلة وبتهديدات مباشرة أكثر إزاء حياتنا وحريتنا وراحتنا.”
― اريك فروم

53. “Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows ‘what he wants,’ while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.”
― Erich Fromm

54. “Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities and the connection that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable.”
― Erich Fromm

55. “The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.”
― Erich Fromm

56. “One is not loved accidentally; one’s own power to love produces love – just as being interested makes one interesting. People are concerned with the question of whether they are attractive while they forget that the essence of attractiveness is their own capacity to love. To love a person productively implies to care and to feel responsible for his life, not only for his physical existence but for the growth and development of all his human powers. To love productively is incompatible with being passive, with being an onlooker at the loved person’s life; it implies labor and care and the responsibility for his growth.”
― Erich Fromm

57. “The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.”
― Erich Fromm

58. “Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.”
― Erich Fromm

59. “Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with – the love of life”
― Erich Fromm

60. “We should free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same “ common sense.” Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human. True compassion and knowledge of man has been largely underrated as a revolutionary factor in the development of man, just as art has been. It is a noteworthy phenomenon that in the development of capitalism and its ethics, compassion (or mercy) ceases to be a virtue.”
― Erich Fromm

61. “Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a “standing in,” not a “falling for.” In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.”
― Erich Fromm

62. “Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”
― Erich Fromm

63. “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

64. “Greed has no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.”
― Erich Fromm

65. “معرفة الحقيقة ليست مسألة الذكاء في المقام الأول , بل مسألة الطبع .”
― اريك فروم, ما وراء الأوهام

66. “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

67. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

68. “Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but moving, growing, working together; even when there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized.”
― Erich Fromm

69. “Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Love is not a spontaneous feeling, a thing that you fall into, but is something that requires thought, knowledge, care, giving, and respect. And it is something that is rare and difficult to find in capitalism, which commodifies human activity. ”
― Eric Fromm

70. “There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.”
― Erich Fromm

71. “شرط الوجود الاجتماعي هو الوجود في البيت ، وشرط الإصغاء إلى الآخر هو الإصغاء إلى الذات”
― اريك فروم, فن الإصغاء: دراسة

72. “Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.”
― Erich Fromm

73. “To be loved because of one’s merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this, or that – there is always a fear that love could disappear.”
― Erich Fromm

74. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

75. “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

76. “Without effort and willingness to experience pain and anxiety, nobody grows, in fact nobody achieves anything worth achieving.”
― Erich Fromm

77. “We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigour, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self; to have faith in this self and in life.”
― Erich Fromm

78. “Escape from Freedom attempts to show, modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.”
― Erich Fromm

79. “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”
― Erich Fromm

80. “إذا كان صحيحًا أن اعتراف المرء بحيرته يشكل بداية الحكمة، فهذه حقيقة لا تتعدى كونها تعليقا بسيطا على حكمة إنسان العصور الحديثة. فنحن رغم الحسنات التي يتمتع بها تعليمنا العالي في المجال الأدبي، ورغم إعدادنا التربوي العام، قد فقدنا تلك الموهبة التي تجعلنا نعرب عن حيرتنا. إذ يفترض بكل الأمور أن تكون معروفة، إن لم يكن من قبلنا فمن قبل بعض الإختصاصيين الذين تقوم مهمتهم على معرفة ما لا قبل لنا بمعرفته. ذلك أن كون المرء في حيرة من أمره يعتبر دليلًا مزعجاً على الدونية الذهنية، حتى أن الأطفال بالذات نادرا ما يعربون عن دهشتهم، أو أنهم على الأصح يحاولون أن لا يعربوا عنها. وهكذا نأخذ كلما تقدمت بنا السن نفتقد شيئا فشيئا إلى ملكة الدهشة، بل نأخذ نعتبر أن إعطاء الجواب الصحيح أمر في غاية الأهمية، في حين أن طرح السؤال الصحيح لا يتخذ في نظرنا، في المقابل، إلا قيمة ثانوية”
― إريك فروم

81. “Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.”
― Erich Fromm

82. “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

83. “The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life – freedom.”
― Erich Fromm

84. “أصبح إنسان اليوم يتصرف مثل الانسان الآلي الذي لا يعرف نفسه ولا يفهمها، والشخص الوحيد الذي يعرفه هو الشخص الذي من المفترض أن يكون عليه، والذي حلت لديه الدردشة عديمة المعنى محل الحديث التواصلي، وحلت ابتسامته المصطنعة محل الضحكة الراقية التي تخرج من القلب، واستبدل الألم الراقي باحساس من اليأس الممل، وهناك عبارتان يمكن وصف هذا الفرد بهما؛ الأولى أنه يعاني من عيوب في التعامل بتلقائية وعيوب في شخصيته والتي تبدو غير قابلة للعلاج، وفي نفس الوقت يمكن القول أنه لا يختلف اختلافا أساسيا عن ملايين البشر الذين يعج بهم الكون.”
― اريك فروم

85. “In spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.
Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which “only” profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend energy on?”
― Erich Fromm

86. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

87. “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

88. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

89. “There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feelings as “moral indignation,” which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue. The “indignant” person has for once the satisfaction of despising and treating a creature as “inferior,” coupled with the feeling of his own superiority and rightness.”
― Erich Fromm

90. “Freedom does not mean license.”
― Erich Fromm

91. “You do many things at once; you read, listen to the radio, talk, smoke, eat, drink. You are the consumer with the open mouth, eager and ready to swallow everything—pictures, liquor, knowledge. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves. To sit still, without talking, smoking, reading, drinking, is impossible for most people. They become nervous and fidgety, and must do something with their mouth or their hands.”
― Erich Fromm

92. “Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.”
― Erich Fromm

93. “Take for instance a man driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness; or another one driven by ambition, or greed for money. In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion, and his activity is in reality a “passivity” because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the “actor.” On the other hand a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his oneness with the world, is considered to be “passive”, because he is not “doing” anything. In reality, this attitude of concentrated meditation is the highest activity there is, an activity of the soul, which is possible only under the condition of inner freedom and independence.”
― Erich Fromm

94. “Wenn ich zu einem anderen sagen kann: “Ich liebe dich”, muss ich auch sagen können: “Ich liebe in dir auch alle anderen, ich liebe durch dich die ganze Welt, ich liebe in dir auch mich selbst.”
― Erich Fromm

95. “Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed—he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?”
― Erich Fromm

96. “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”
― Erich Fromm

97. “إن الحب الطفولي يسير على مبدأ “إنني أحب لأنني محبوب” أما الحب النرجسي فإنه يسير على مبدأ “إنني أحبك لأنني أحتاج إليك” أم الحب الناضِج فيقول: “إنني أحتاج إليك لأنني أحبك”.”
― Erich Fromm

98. “ان اهم مجال للإعطاء ليس هو مجال الأشياء المادية, بل هو المجال الذي يكمن في العالم الانساني بصفة خاصة. فماذا يعطي الانسان للآخر ؟ انه يعطي من نفسه, من أثمن ما يملك, انه يعطي حياته. وليس هذا يعني بالضرورة انه يضحي بحياته للآخر-بل انه يعني انه يعطيه من ذلك الشيء الحي فيه, انه يعطيه من فرحه, من شغفه, من فهمه, من علمه, من مرحه, من حزنه- من كل التعابير والتجليات لذلك الشيء الحي الذي فيه. وهكذا باعطائه من حياته انما يثري الشخص الآخر بالحياة وذلك بتعزيزه لشعوره هو بالحياة. انه لا يعطي لكي يتلقى, العطاء هو ذاته فرح رفيع. ولكنه في العطاء لا يملك الا أن يحمل شيئا الى الحياة في الشخص الآخر, وذلك الذي يحمله الى الحياة ينعكس بالتالي عليه, انه العطاء الحقيقي لا يملك الا أن يتلقى ما يعود اليه ثانية. العطاء يتضمن جعل الشخص الآخر شخصا معطاء أيضا والاثنان يشتركان في فرح ما قد حملاه الى الحياة. في فعل العطاء يولد شيء ما, وكلا الشخصين يكونان شاكرين للحياد التي تولد لهما كليهما. ويعني هذا بالنسبة للحب اذا شئنا التخصيص: ان الحب قوة تنتج الحب, والعقم هو العجز عن انتاج الحب.”
― Erich Fromm

99. “Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one’s own wishes with existing reality.”
― Erich Fromm

100. “the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of the inability of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking. The word power has a twofold meaning. One is the possession of power over somebody, the ability to dominate him; the other meaning is the possession of power to do something, to be able, to be potent. The latter meaning has nothing to do with domination; it expresses mastery in the sense of ability.”
― Erich Fromm

101. “The person who is normal in terms of being well adapted is often less healthy than the neurotic person in terms of human values. Often he is well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes he is expected to be.”
― Erich Fromm

102. “Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure.”
― Erich Fromm

103. “Love is a power which produces love.”
― Erich Fromm

104. “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

105. “It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health. Just as there is a “folie a deux” there is a folie a millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
― Erich Fromm

106. “The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.”
― Erich Fromm

107. “In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a ‘nine to fiver’, he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organisation of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organisation, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinised in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theatre owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening – all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?”
― Erich Fromm

108. “أن الحب الناضج هو الوحدة، بشرط الحفاظ على تكامل الإنسان، الحفاظ على تفردية الانسان”.”
― إريك فروم

109. “We are what we do.”
― Erich Fromm

110. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

111. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

112. “To be fully awake is the condition for not being bored, or being boring—and indeed, not to be bored or boring is one of the main conditions for loving. To be active in thought, feeling, with one’s eyes and ears, throughout the day, to avoid inner laziness, be it in the form of being receptive, hoarding, or plain wasting one’s time, is an indispensable condition for the practice of the art of loving.”
― Erich Fromm

113. “Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.”
― Erich Fromm

114. “…Today the lack of faith is an expression of profound confusion and despair. Once skepticism and rationalism were progressive forces for the development of thought; now they have become rationalizations for relativism and uncertainty.”
― Erich Fromm

115. “Love is an act of faith.”
― Erich Fromm

116. “If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either.”
― Erich Fromm

117. “The task of the moral philosopher-thinker is to support and strengthen the voice of human conscience, to recognize what is good or what is bad for people, whether they are good or bad for society in a period of evolution. May be a “voice crying in the wilderness”, but only if that voice remains lively and uncompromising, it is possible to transform the desert into fertile land.”
― Erich Fromm

118. “I think that the word bored does not get the attention it deserves. We speak of all sorts of terrible things that happen to people, but we rarely speak about one of the most terrible things of all : that is, being bored, being bored alone and, worse than that, being bored together.”
― Erich Fromm

119. “If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences,that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, i perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood. This relatedness from center to center – instead of that from periphery to periphery – is ‘central relatedness’.”
― Erich Fromm

120. “What kind of men, then, does our society need? What is the “social character” suited to twentieth century Capitalism? It needs men who co-operate smoothly in large groups; who want to consume more and more, and whose tasks are standardized and can easily be influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority, or principle, or conscience – yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction.”
― Erich Fromm

121. “The failure of modern culture lies not in its principle of individualism, not in the idea that moral virtue is the same as the pursuit of self-interest, but in the deterioration of the meaning of self-interest; not in the fact that people are too much concerned with their self-interest, but that they are not concerned enough with the interest of their real self; not in the fact that they are too selfish, but that they do not love themselves.”
― Erich Fromm

122. “Perhaps most trivial talk is a need to talk about oneself; hence, the never-ending subject of health and sickness, children, travel, successes, what one did, and the innumerable daily things that seem to be important. Since one cannot talk about oneself all the time without being thought a bore, one must exchange the privilege by a readiness to listen to others talking about themselves. Private social meetings between individuals (and often, also, meetings of all kinds of associations and groups) are little markets where one exchanges one’s need to talk about oneself and one’s desire to be listened to for the need of others who seek the same opportunity. Most people respect this arrangement of exchange; those who don’t, and want to talk more about themselves than they are willing to listen, are “cheaters,” and they are resented and have to choose inferior company in order to be tolerated.”
― Erich Fromm

123. “The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality. Hundreds of scattered and unrelated facts are dumped into the heads of students; their time and energy are taken up by learning more and more facts so that there is little left for thinking. To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but “information” alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it.”
― Erich Fromm

124. “بالتطابق مع توقعات الآخرين, بالا يكون الانسان مختلفا, نخرس هذه الشكوك عن ذاتية الانسان ويتم الحصول على امان معين. وعلى اية حال يكون قد دفع الثمن غاليا. ان التنازل عن التلقائية والفردية يفضي الى انجراف الحياة ومن الناحية السيكولوجية ان الانسان الآلي بينما هو حي بيولوجيا هو ميت انفعاليا وذهنيا. بينما هو يقوم بحركات الحياة, فان الحياة تنساب من بين يديه كالرمال. ان الانسان الحديث وراء جبهة من الرضاء والتفاؤل غير سعيد في الاعماق, كحقيقة واقعة, انه على شفا اليأس. انه يتمسك يائسا بفكرة التفردية, انه يريد ان يكون “مختلفا” وليست لديه توصية اكثر من قوله:” ان الامر مختلف”. ان الانسان الحديث تواق للحياة, ولكن لما كان انسانا آليا فانه لا يستطيع ان يعيش الحياة بمعنى النشاط التلقائي الذي يتخذه ويحله محل اي نوع من الاضطرابات او الاثارة: اثارة السكر والرياضة والمعايشة العنيفة لاضطرابات الاشخاص الخياليين على شاشة السينما.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

125. “The “pathology of normalcy” rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society – and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.”
― Erich Fromm

126. “While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome. Our civilization offers many palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this aloneness: first of all the strict routine of bureaucratized, mechanical work, which helps people to remain unaware of their most fundamental human desires, of the longing for transcendence and unity. Inasmuch as the routine alone does not succeed in this, man overcomes his unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry; furthermore by the satisfaction of buying ever new things, and soon exchanging them for others. Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow men, guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as: “When the individual feels, the community reels”; or “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today,” or, as the crowning statement: “Everybody is happy nowadays.” Man’s happiness today consists in “having fun.” Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and “taking in” commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed.”
― Erich Fromm

127. “We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.”
― Erich Fromm

128. “تعتمد قوة موقع الإنسان في الحياة على درجة كفاءة إدراكه للواقع, وكلما نقصت كفائته يزداد تشوشه وبالتالي يتنامى شعوره بعدم الأمان, فيصبح بحاجة إلى أوهام يتكئ عليها ليجد الامان الذي ينشده. وكلما ازدادت كفائته تزداد إمكانيته في الوقوف على قدميه وإيجاد جوهره داخل ذاته.”
― Erich Fromm

129. “Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.”
― Erich Fromm

130. “Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say “I love you,” the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word “love” is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses. The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish — yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience. The same holds true for all other achievements of man; ideas, art, any kind of man-made objects. They are man’s creations; they are valuable aids for life, yet each one of them is also a trap, a temptation to confuse life with things, experience with artifacts, feeling with surrender and submission.”
― Erich Fromm

131. “Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man’s happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl—and for the woman an attractive man—are the prizes they are after. ‘Attractive’ usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking girl, tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands more domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious—today he has to be social and tolerant—in order to be an attractive ‘package’. At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one’s own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.”
― Erich Fromm

132. “To love somebody is not just a strong feeling—it 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

133. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

134. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

135. “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

136. “Well-being is the state of having arrived at the full development of reason: reason not in the sense of a merely intellectual judgment, but in that of grasping truth by “letting things be” (to use Heidegger’s term) as they are. Well-being is possible only to the degree to which one has overcome one’s narcissism; to the degree to which one is open, responsive, sensitive, awake, empty (in the Zen sense). Well-being means to be fully related to man and nature affectively, to overcome separateness and alienation, to arrive at the experience of oneness with all that exists—and yet to experience myself at the same time as the separate entity I am, as the individual. Well-being means to be fully born, to become what one potentially is; it means to have the full capacity for joy and for sadness or, to put it still differently, to awake from the half-slumber the average man lives in, and to be fully awake. If it is all that, it means also to be creative; that is, to react and to respond to myself, to others, to everything that exists—to react and to respond as the real, total man I am to the reality of everybody and everything as he or it is. In this act of true response lies the area of creativity, of seeing the world as it is and experiencing it as my world, the world created and transformed by my creative grasp of it, so that the world ceases to be a strange world “over there” and becomes my world. Well-being means, finally, to drop one’s Ego, to give up greed, to case chasing after the preservation and the aggrandizement of the Ego, to be and to experience one’s self in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using.”
― Erich Fromm

137. “The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep.”
― Erich Fromm

138. “هذا الفقدان للذاتية لا يزال يزيد من طابع الارغام على التطابق, انه يعني ان الانسان لا يستطيع ان يتأكد من نفسه الا اذا عاش حسبما يتوقع الآخرون. واذا لم نعش حسب هذه الصورة فاننا لا نخاطر فحسب بالاستهجان والعزلة المتزايدة, بل نخاطر بفقد ذاتية شخصيتنا التي تعني تعرض سلامتنا العقلية للخطر.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

139. “There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.”
― Erich Fromm

140. “The ultimate choice for a man, in as much as he is given to transcend himself, is to create or destroy, to love or to hate.”
― Erich Fromm

141. “Capitalism puts things (capital) higher than life (labor). Power follows from possession, not from activity.”
― Erich Fromm

142. “The basic for any approach to self-transformation is an ever-increasing awareness of reality and the shedding of illusions.”
― Erich Fromm

143. “The more man understands and masters nature the less he needs to use religion as a scientific explanation and as a magical device for controlling nature.”
― Erich Fromm

144. “What holds true for the individual holds true for a society. It is never static; if it does not grow, it decays; if it does not transcend the status quo for the better, it changes for the worse. Often we, the individual or the people who make up a society, have the illusion we could stand still and not alter the given situation in the one or the other direction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions. The moment we stand still, we begin to decay.”
― Erich Fromm

145. “People are confused and unsure, they seek answers to guide them to joy, tranquillity, self-knowledge, salvation―but they also demand that it be easy to learn, that it require little or no effort, that results be quickly obtained.”
― Erich Fromm

146. “I cannot know who I am, because I don’t know which part of me is not me.”
― Erich Fromm

147. “Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.”
― Erich Fromm

148. “Each new step into his new human existence is frightening. It always means to give up a secure state, which was relatively known, for one which is new, which one has not yet mastered. Undoubtedly, if the infant could think at the moment of the severance of the umbilical cord, he would experience the fear of dying. A loving fate protects us from this first panic. But at any new step, at any new stage of our birth, we are afraid again. We are never free from two conflicting tendencies: one to emerge from the womb, from the animal form of existence into a more human existence, from bondage to freedom; another, to return to the womb, to nature, to certainty and security.”
― Erich Fromm

149. “Both the mentally healthy and the neurotic are driven by the need to find an answer [to the problem of human existence], the only difference being that one answer corresponds more to the total needs of man, and hence is more conducive to the unfolding of his powers and to his happiness than the other. All cultures provide for a patterned system in which certain solutions are predominant, hence certain strivings and satisfactions…. The deviate from the cultural pattern is just as much in search of an answer as his more well-adjusted brother. His answer may be better or worse than the one given by his culture – it is always another answer to the same fundamental question raised by human existence. In this sense all cultures are religious and every neurosis is a private form of religion, provided we mean by religion an attempt to answer the problem of human existence.”
― Erich Fromm

150. “Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.”
― Erich Fromm

151. “The source of irrational authority, on the other hand, is always power over people. This power can be physical or mental, it can be realistic or only relative in terms of the anxiety and helplessness of the person submitting to this authority. Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built. Criticism of the authority is not only required but forbidden. Rational authority is based upon the equality of both authority and subject, which differ only with respect to the degree of knowledge of skill in a praticular field. Irrational authority is by its very nature based on inequality, implying difference in value.”
― Erich Fromm

152. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

153. “Frequently, and not only in the popular usage, sadomasochism is confounded with love. Masochistic phenomena, especially, are looked upon as expressions of love. An attitude of complete self-denial for the sake of another person and the surrender of one’s own rights and claims to another person have been praised as examples of “great love”. It seems that there is no better proof for “love” than sacrifice and the readiness to give oneself up for the sake of the beloved person. Actually, in these cases, “love” is essentially a masochistic yearning and rooted in the symbiotic need of the person involved.”
― Erich Fromm

154. “The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society – and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.”
― Erich Fromm

155. “The intensity and excitement which accompanies moments of infatuation is frequently relative to the degree of loneliness and isolation which has been previously experienced.”
― Erich Fromm

156. “اننا فخورون باننا لسنا خاضعين لاية قوة خارجية, واننا احرار في التعبير عن افكارنا ومشاعرنا ونحن نأخذ بثقة ان هذه الحرية تكاد تضمن على نحو تلقائي آلي فرديتنا. وعلى اية حال, فان حق التعبير عن افكارنا لا يعني شيئا الا اذا كان قادرين على ان تكون لنا افكار من انفسنا, ان التحرر من السلطة الخارجية هو مكسب اخير اذا ما كانت الظروف السيكولوجية الباطنية هي بشكل يمكننا من تأسيس تفرديتنا. فهل نحن حققنا ذلك الهدف او اننا على الاقل نقترب منه ؟”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

157. “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.”
― Erich Fromm

158. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

159. “People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love—or to be loved by—is difficult.”
― Erich Fromm

160. “Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie – not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one’s voice, one’s gesture, one’s eyes, one’s facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only “people,” but the very people we trusted most – our parents, teachers, leaders.”
― Erich Fromm

161. “To some people return to religion is the answer, not as an act of faith but in order to escape an intolerable doubt; they make this decision not out of devotion but in search of security.”
― Erich Fromm

162. “Indeed the alienated person finds it almost impossible to remain by himself, because he is seized by the panic of experiencing nothingness.”
― Erich Fromm

163. “ليس في الحب وحده يكون العطاء معناه التلقي، فالمدرس يتعلم من تلامذته والممثل يستثيره جمهوره والمحلل النفسي يُشفى على يد مريضه – بشرط ألا يعامل الواحد منهم الآخرين على أنه أشياء، بل على أن كل واحدٍ منهم مرتبط بالآخر على نحو أصيل ومثمر.”
― Erich Fromm

164. “Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours.”
― Erich Fromm

165. “We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; 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

166. “Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”
― Erich Fromm

167. “Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses re-open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to “positive freedom”; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world. This second course never reunites him with the world in the way he was related to it before he merged as an “individual,” for the fact of his separateness cannot be reversed; it is an escape from an unbearable situation which would make life impossible if it were prolonged. This course of escape, therefore, is characterized by its compulsive character, like every escape from threatening panic; it is also characterized by the more or less complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self. Thus it is not a solution which leads to happiness and positive freedom; it is, in principle, a solution which is to be found in all neurotic phenomena. It assuages an unbearable anxiety and makes life possible by avoiding panic; yet it does not solve the underlying problem and is paid for by a kind of life that often consists only of automatic or compulsive activities.”
― Erich Fromm

168. “الدين والقومية,وكذلك اية عادة وأي معتقد مهما يكن عبثا ومحطا ,ان كان يربط الفرد بالآخرين فهي ملاجئ مما يخشاه الانسان ايما خشية : كالعزلة .”
― اريك فروم

169. “To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. Knowledge would be empty if it were not motivated by concern. There are many layers of knowledge; the knowledge which is an aspect of love is one which does not stay at the periphery, but penetrates to the core. It is possible only when I can transcend the concern for myself and see the other person in his own terms. I may know, for instance, that a person is angry, even if he does not show it overtly; but I may know him more deeply than that; then I know that he is anxious, and worried; that he feels lonely, that he feels guilty. Then I know that his anger is only the manifestation of something deeper, and I see him as anxious and embarrassed, that is, as the suffering person, rather than as the angry one.”
― Erich Fromm

170. “The common element in both submission and domination is the symbiotic nature of relatedness. Both persons involved have lost their integrity and freedom; they live on each other and from each other, satisfying their craving for closeness, yet suffering from the lack of inner strength and self-reliance which would require freedom and independence, and furthermore constantly threatened by the conscious or unconscious hostility which is bound to arise from the symbiotic relationship.10 The realization of the submissive (masochistic) or the domineering (sadistic) passion never leads to satisfaction.”
― Erich Fromm

171. “Equality today means “sameness,” rather than “oneness.” It is the sameness of abstractions, of the men who work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, who read the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and the same ideas.”
― Erich Fromm

172. “We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.”
― Erich Fromm

173. “Die meisten Menschen sehen das Problem der Liebe in erster Linie als das Problem, selbst geliebt zu werden, statt zu lieben und lieben zu können.”
― Erich Fromm

174. “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?”
― Erich Fromm

175. “The value judgments we make determine our actions, and upon their validity rests our mental health and happiness.”
― Erich Fromm

176. “Mental health cannot be defined in terms of the “adjustment” of the individual to his society, but, on the other hand, that it must be defined in terms of the society to the needs of man, of its role in furthering or hindering the development of mental health. Whether or not the individual is healthy, is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society.”
― Erich Fromm

177. “The common suffering is the alienation from oneself, from one’s fellow man, and from nature; the awareness that life runs out of one’s hand like sand, and that one will die without having lived; that one lives in the midst of plenty and yet is joyless.”
― Erich Fromm

178. “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

179. “The experience of humanism is that ‘nothing human is alien to me’; that I carry within myself all of humanity; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist in myself. I am the criminal and the saint. I am the child and the adult. I am the man who lived 100000 years ago and the man who will live 100000 years from now.”
― Erich Fromm

180. “The anxiety engendered by confronting the abyss of nothingness [of the loss of self] is more terrifying than the tortures of hell. In the vision of hell, I am punished and tortured—In the vision of nothingness I am driven to the border of madness—because I cannot say ‘I’ any more.”
― Erich Fromm

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

182. “We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for.”
― Erich Fromm

183. “لقد أصبح الكلام إدمانا: انا اتكلم إذا أنا موجود, أنا اتكلم إذا أنا لست نكرة, أنا أتكلم إذا لدي ماض, وعمل, وأسرة, وبحديثي عن كل ماسبق فإني أؤكد على ذاتي.”
― Erich Fromm

184. “كلما ضعفت ذات المرء تتعاظم خشيته من فقدانها أثناء التركيز على ماهو ليس ذاته.”
― Erich Fromm

185. “Beyond the element of giving, the active characteristic of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsability, respect and knowledge”
― Erich Fromm

186. “The right to express our thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own; freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if the inner psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality.”
― Erich Fromm

187. “Faith in life, in oneself, in others must be built on the hard rock of realism; that is to say, on the capacity to see evil where it is, to see swindle, destructiveness, and selfishness not only when they are obvious but in their many disguises and rationalizations. Indeed, faith, love, and hope must go together with such a passion for seeing reality in all its nakedness that the outsider would be prone to call the attitude ‘cynicism.’ And cynical it is, when we mean by it the refusal to be taken in by the sweet and plausible lies that cover almost everything that is said and believed. But this kind of cynicism is not cynicism; it is uncompromisingly critical, a refusal to play the game in a system of deception.”
― Erich Fromm

188. “People are afraid to concentrate because they are afraid of losing themselves if they are too absorbed in another person, in an idea, in an event. The less strong their self, the greater the fear of losing themselves in the act of concentration on the non-self.”
― Erich Fromm

189. “أصبح إنسان اليوم يتصرف مثل الإنسان الآلي الذي لا يعرف نفسه ولا يفهمها، والشخص الوحيد الذي يعرفه هو الشخص الذي من المفترض أن يكون عليه، والذي حلت لديه الدردشة عديمة المعنى محل الحديث التواصلي، وحلت ابتسامته المصطنعة محل الضحكة الراقية التي تخرج من القلب، واستبدل الألم الراقي بإحساس من اليأس الممل. وهناك عبارتان يمكن وصف هذا الفرد بهما؛ الأولى أنه يعاني من عيوب في التعامل بتلقائية وعيوب في شخصيته والتي تبدو غير قابلة للعلاج، وفي نفس الوقت يمكن القول إنه لا يختلف اختلافًا أساسيًا عن ملايين البشر الذين يعج بهم الكون.”
― Erich Fromm

190. “إن الانفعالات في مجتمعنا لا يحدث لها تشجيع بصفة عامة. وبينما ليس هناك شك في أن أي تفكير خلاق -وكذلك أي نشاط خلاق آخر- مرتبط لا محالة بالانفعال، فقد أصبح من المثاليات أن نفكر وأن نعيش بالانفعالات. أن تكون “منفعلًا” قد أصبح مرادفًا لأن تكون لست متزنًا أو لست على ما يرام. والفرد بتقبله هذا المعيار قد أصبح ضعيفا إلى حد كبير.
لقد افتقر تفكيره وتسطح. ومن جهة أخرى، لما لم يكن في الامكان قتل الانفعالات تمامًا، فإنه لا بد من أن يكون لها وجودها بعيدًا عن الجانب العقلي من الشخصية، والنتيجة هي العاطفة الرخيصة وغير المخلصة التي تغذي بها السينما والأغنيات الشعبية ملايين من الزبائن المحرومين من العواطف.”
― اريك فروم

191. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

192. “الفرد في كل نشاط تلقائي يعانق العالم. فلا تظل نفسه الفردية لم تُقضَ فحسب, بل هي تصبح اكثر قوة واشد صلابة. فالنفس تكون قوية بقدر ما تكون نشطة. لا يوجد اية قوة اصيلة في التملك كتملك, لا في الملكية المادية ولا في الصفات الذهنية مثل الانفعالات او الافكار. كما انه لا يوجد ايضا قوة في استخدام واستغلال الموضوعات, ان ما نستخدمه ليس ملكنا بكل بساطة لاننا نستخدمه. ان ما هو ملكنا هو فقط الذي نرتبط به بنشاطنا الخلاق سواء كان هذا شخصا او موضوعا غير حي. ان تلك الصفات الناجمة عن نشاطنا التلقائي هي وحدها التي تعطي قوة للنفس ومن ثم تكوّن اساس التكامل. والعجز عن السلوك تلقائيا والتعبير عما يشعر به المرء ويفكر فيه بأصالة والضرورة الناجمة لتقديم نفس زائفة للآخرين وللانسان هي كلها جذر الشعور بالدونية والضعف. وسواء كنا ندري هذا ام لا, فلا شيء يدعونا الى الخجل اكثر من الا نكون انفسنا, ولا يوجد شيء يمكن ان يعطينا فخارا وسعادة اكثر من التفكير والشعور والقول بما هو نحن.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

193. “الصعوبة الخاصة في ادراك الى اي مدى لا تكون فيه رغباتنا -وافكارنا ومشاعرنا بالمثل- حقا رغباتنا بل وُضعت فينا من الخارج مرتبطة ارتباطا وثيقا بمشكلة السلطة و الحرية. في سيرورة التاريخ الحديث حلت محل سلطة الكنيسة سلطة الدولة وحلت محل سلطة الدولة سلطة الضمير وفي حقبتنا الراهنة حلت محل سلطة الضمير السلطة المجهولة للحس المشترك العام والرأي العام كأدوات للتطابق. ولاننا قد حررنا انفسنا من الاشكال الصريحة القديمة للسلطة فاننا لا نتبين اننا اصبحنا فريسة نوع جديد للسلطة. لقد اصبحنا آلات آلية نعيش في ظل وهم الافراد ذوي الارادة الذاتية. هذا الوهم يساعد الفرد على ان يظل غير مدرك لعدم زعزعته, ولكن هذا هو كل العون الذي يستطبع وهم ان يمنحه. ونفس الفرد ضعيفة اساسا, حتى انه يشعر بالعجز والزعزعة الشديدية. انه يعيش في عالم فقد فيه التعلق الاصيل به والذي فيه قد اصبح كل شيء وكل شيء مصطبغا بصبغة الاداة التي تؤدي عملها بلا تفكير حيث اصبح جزءا من آلة بنتها يداه. انه يفكر ويشعر ويريد ما يعتقد انه مفروض فيه ان يفكر فيه ويشعر به ويريده, وفي هذه العملية ذاتها يفقد نفسه التي عليها يجب ان ينبني كل أمان أصيل لفرد حر.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

194. “يهم أن نعرف أيَّ نوعٍ من الوحدة نتحدث عنه عندما نتحدث عن الحب: هل نشير إلى الحب كحلٍّ ناضج لمشكلة الوجود؟ أم أننا نتكلم عن تلك الأشكال غير الناضجة للحب التي يمكن أن تُسمى وحدة تكافلية؟”
― Erich Fromm

195. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

196. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

197. “Society must be organized in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.”
― Erich Fromm

198. “A man driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness; or another one driven by ambition, or greed for money. In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion, and his activity is in reality a “passivity” because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the “actor.” On the other hand, a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his oneness with the world, is considered to be “passive,” because he is not “doing” anything.”
― Erich Fromm

199. “كذلك يختل ميزان الثقافة فى كل مكان، فمازال عدد الأميين والجهلاء كثيراً لا يحصى. ولدينا من أدوات التثقيف الإذاعة والتلفزيون ودور السينما والصحف اليومية. بيد أن هذه الأدوات بدلاً من أن تنشر بين الناس روائع الأدب القديم والحديث، والعلم الصحيح، والموسيقى الرفيعة، تملأ الرؤوس عن طريق السمع والبصر بسخافات المعرفة وتوافع الأمور، وتنفث سمومها فى العقول والأذهان.”
― Erich Fromm

200. “Yet all this bespeaks a dim realization of the truth—the truth that modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.”
― Erich Fromm

201. “Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.”
― Erich Fromm

202. “..فالسمة الأساسية للطبيعة الإنسانية هي مقدرتها على معرفة ذاتها ومعرفة ما ليس منها، أو ما هو مختلف عنها. وما أن يعي الإنسان هذه الحقيقة حتى نعزل عن الطبيعة وبقية الكائنات، وهذا الإنعزال أو الإنفصال إذا نظرنا إليه من ناحيته الإيجابية يكون الحرية، أما من ناحيته السلبية فهو الإغتراب”
― Erich Fromm

203. “فاذا حقق الفرد نفسه بالنشاط التلقائي ومن ثم تعلق بالعالم, فانه يكف عن ان يكون ذرة منعزلة, انه والعالم يصبحان جزءا من كل مبنى واحد, ان له مكانته الحقة ومن ثم يختفي شكه فيما يتعلق بنفسه ومعنى الحياة. هذا الشك ينبعث من انفصاله ومن انجراف الحياة, وعندما يتمكن من الحياة لا بطريقة تلقائية فان الشك يختفي. انه يدرك نفسه كفرد فعال وخلاق ويدرك ان هناك فحسب المعنى الوحيد للحياة: فعل الحياة نفسه.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

204. “ان مشكلة معرفة الانسان مماثلة للمشكلة الدينية الخاصة بمعرفة الله. في اللاهوت الغربي التقليدي تبذل المحاولة لمعرفة الله بالفكر, والادلاء بعبارات عن الله. ان هذا اللاهوت يفترض انني استطيع ان اعرف الله في فكري. وفي التصوف الذي هو المحصلة المترتبة على الوحدانية او التوحيد فان المحاولة لمعرفة الله عن طريق الفكر يجري الاقلاع عنها, وتحل محلها تجربة الاتحاد بالله حيث لا تعود هناك ضرورة- ولاحاجة- لمعرفة شيء عن الله.
ان تجربة الوحدة او الاتحاد بالانسان, او بالله اذا تحدثنا على نحو ديني ليست تجربة لا عقلانية. بل بالعكس, انها على نحو ما نوه البرت شفايتزر نتيجة العقلانية, انها نتيجتها الجرئية والمتطرفة للغاية. انها قائمة على معرفة محدوديات معرفتنا الرئيسية لا العرضية. انها المعرفة بأننا لن نستحوذ مطلقا على سر الانسان والكون, ولكننا مع هذا نستطيع ان نعرف في فعل الحب. ان علم النفس كعلم له حدوده, وكما ان النتيجة المنطقية للاهوت في التصوف لان النتيجة القصوى لعلم النفس هي الحب.”
― Erich Fromm

205. “الحب الاخوي هو حب بين اثنين متساويين, ولكن حتى لو كنا متساوين حقا فاننا لسنا “متساوين” دائما, وذلك بقدر ما نحن بشر فاننا جميعا محتاجون الى المساعدة. اليوم أنا وغدا أنت. لكن هذه الحاجة الى المساعدة لا تعني أن الواحد عاجز والآخر قوي. العجز حالة مؤقتة, فالقدرة على الوقوف والمشي على القدمين هي الحالة الدائمة والشائعة.”
― Erich Fromm

206. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

207. “التحرر من” ليس متطابقا مع الحرية الايجابية, “الحرية لـ ” ان بزوغ الانسان من الطبيعة هو عملية طويلة مستخلصة, انه الى حد كبير يظل مقيدا بالعالم الذي منه ظهر, انه يظل جزءا من الطبيعة – التربة التي يعيش عليها, الشمس والقمر والنجوم, الشجر والازهار, الحيوانات, ومجموع الناس الذين يرتبط معهم بروابط الدم.
والادباء البدائية شاهد على شعور الانسان بتوحده مع الطبيعة. فالطبيعة الحية وغير الحية جزء من عالمه الانساني, او كما يمكن للانسان ان يضع الامر, انه لا يزال جزءا من العالم الطبيعي.
هذه الروابط الاولية تسد الطريق امام تطوره الانساني الكامل, انها تقف في طريق تطوير عقله وقدراته النقدية, انها لا تدعه يعرف نفسه والآخرين الا من خلال وسيط مشاركته او مشاركتهم في قبيلة او جماعة اجتماعية او دينية لا كبشر, بقول آخر, انها تقف عقبة في طريق تطوره كفرد حر محدد لذاته منتج. ولكن بالرغم من هذا الجانب, هناك جانب آخر. هذا التوحد مع الطبيعة والقبيلة والدين يعطي الفرد امانا. انه يمت الى, انه مغروس في كل مبنى يكون فيه مكان لا جدال فيه. انه قد يعاني من الجوع او القهر, لكنه لا يعاني من اسوأ الآلام, الوحدة الكاملة والشك الكامل.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

208. “Hanya ada satu kepastian, yaitu kepastian tentang masa lampau. Sedangkan tentang masa depan, yang ada hanyalah kepastian tentang kematian”
― Erich Fromm

209. “We have faith in the potentialities of other, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and of love.”
― Erich Fromm

210. “في الحب يحدث الانفراق: اثنان يصبحان واحدًا ومع هذا يظلان اثنين.”
― إريك فروم

211. “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 towards becoming human by becoming an “individual”. He has committed the first act of freedom. The myth emphasizes the suffering resulting from this act. To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid. The newly won freedom appears as a curse; he is free from the sweet bondage of paradise, but he is not free to govern himself, to realize his individuality.”
― Erich Fromm

212. “إن الأمر بحاجة إلى بحث عميق وتحليل دقيق لكى ننفذ إلى الحقيقة ونحكم على أنفسنا حكما أقرب إلى الصواب.”
― Erich Fromm

213. “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

214. “إننا لا ننكر أن الإنسانية وسط هذا الضجيج والعجيج لا تعدم نفراً من العقلاء بنادون بعقد معاهدات الصلح ونشر ألوية السلام فى ربوع العالم بأسره. غير أن قصارى ما يبذله هؤلاء العقلاء من جهد لا يعدو أن يكون كلمات مكتوبة وحبراً على ورق.”
― Erich Fromm

215. “For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice.”
― Erich Fromm

216. “It is desirable to avoid trivial and evil company altogether—unless one can assert oneself fully, and thus make the other doubt his own position.”
― Erich Fromm

217. “Many psychiatrists, including psychoanalysts, have painted the picture of a “normal” personality which is never too sad, too angry, or too excited. They use words like “infantile” or “neurotic” to denounce traits of types of personalities that do not conform with the conventional pattern of a “normal” individual. This kind of influence is in a way more dangerous than the older and franker forms of name-calling. Then the individual knew at least that there was some person or some doctrine which criticized him and he could fight back. But who can fight back at “science”?”
― Erich Fromm

218. “We are poor in spite of all our wealth because we have much, but we are little.’ As a result, the average man feels insecure, lonely, depressed, and suffers from a lack of joy in the midst of plenty. Life does not make sense to him; he is dimly aware that the meaning of life cannot lie in being nothing but a ‘consumer.’ He could not stand the joylessness and meaninglessness of life were it not for the fact that the system offers him innumerable avenues of escape, ranging from television to tranquilizers, which permit him to forget that he is losing more and more of all that is valuable in life.”
― Erich Fromm

219. “Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.”
― Erich Fromm

220. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

221. “Lack of concentration makes one tired, while concentration wakes one up.”
― Erich Fromm

222. “فاذا حدث وتقطعت الروابط الاولية التي تعطي للانسان الامان, واذا حدث ان واجه الفرد العالم الذي خارجه كذاتية منفصلة تماما, فان امامه اتجاهين حيث عليه ان يقهر الحالة التي لا تطاق, حالة العجز والوحدة.
يستطيع في اتجاه منهما ان يتقدم الى “الحرية الايجابية”, يستطيع ان يتعلق على نحو تلقائي بالعالم في الحب والعمل, في التعبير الاصيل عن القدرات العاطفية والحسية والعقلية, وهكذا يستطيع ان يصبح مرة اخرى متحدا مع الانسان والطبيعة ونفسه دون ان يتنازل عن الاستقلال والتكامل الخاصين بنفسه الفردية.
والاتجاه الآخر امامه هو التقهقر والكف عن الحرية ومحاولة قهر وحدته عن طريق استئصال الهوة التي تنشأ بين نفسه الفردية والعالم. وهذا الاتجاه الثاني لا يوجد اطلاقا بالعالم بالطريقة التي كان مرتبطا بها قبل ان يبزغ باعتباره “فردا”, لان حقيقة انفصاله لا يمكن قلبها, انها هرب من موقف لا يطاق يجعل الحياة مستحيلة اذا ما استطالت. وهذا الاتجاه للهروب هو لهذا يتميز بطابعه الارغامي مثل كل هرب من الخطر المهدد, كما انه يتميز ايضا بالتنازل التام بشكل او بآخر عن الفردية وتكامل النفس. ومن ثم فهو ليس حلا يفضي الى السعادة والحرية الايجابية, انه من ناحية المبدأ حل يوجد في كل الظواهر العصابية انه يسكن القلق الذي لا يطاق ويجعل الحياة ممكنة بتجنب الخطر, ومع هذا لا يحل المشكلة الواردة ويندفع له الثمن بنوع من الحياة لا يتألف في الأغلب الا من النشاطات الآلية او الاضطرارية.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

223. “If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an
enlarged egotism. Yet most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the “loved” person. This is the same fallacy which I have already mentioned above. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object – and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of the man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he just has to wait for the right object – and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it. If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, “I love you,” I must be able to say, “I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.”
― Erich Fromm

224. “Man can only know the nagation, never the position of ultimate reality.”
― Erich Fromm

225. “To know and yet [think] we do not know is the highest [attainment]; not to know [and yet think] we do know is a disease.”
― Erich Fromm

226. “بدون حب ما كان يمكن للإنسانية أن توجد يومًا واحدًا”
― إريك فروم

227. “،أن يكون الإنسان نشيطًا يعني أن يجد نفسه وأن ينمو، ويتدفق، ويحب، ويتجاوز سجن ذاته المنعزلة، وأن يكون شغوفًا ومنصتًا ومعطاء”
― Erich Fromm

228. “If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this: in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being “crazy” about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.”
― Erich Fromm

229. “Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. 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

230. “When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life of his children. But one is bound to fail within oneself and for the children. The former because the problem of existence can be solved by each one only for himself, and not by proxy; the latter because one lacks in the very qualities which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer.”
― Erich Fromm

231. “Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individuals, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority. The consensus of all serves as a proof for the correctness of ‘their’ ideas. Since there is still a need to feel some individuality, such need is satisfied with regard to minor differences; the initials on the handbag or the sweater, the name plate of the bank teller, the belonging to the Democratic as against the Republican party, to the Elks instead of to the Shriners become the expression of individual differences. The advertising slogan of ‘it is different’ shows up this pathetic need for difference, when in reality there is hardly any left.”
― Erich Fromm

232. “Care and concern imply another aspect of love; that of responsibility. Today responsibility is often meant to denote duty, something imposed upon one from the outside. But responsibility, in its true sense, is an entirely voluntary act; it is my response to the needs, expressed or unexpressed, of another human being. To be “responsible” means to be able and ready to “respond.” Jonah did not feel responsible to the inhabitants of Nineveh. He, like Cain, could ask: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The loving person responds. The life of his brother is not his brother’s business alone, but his own. He feels responsible for his fellow men, as he feels responsible for himself. This responsibility, in the case of the mother and her infant, refers mainly to the care for physical needs. In the love between adults it refers mainly to the psychic needs of the other person. Responsibility could easily deteriorate into domination and possessiveness, were it not for a third component of love, respect. Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. 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 having to dominate and exploit anyone else. Respect exists only on the basis of freedom: “l’amour est l’enfant de la liberté” as an old French song says; love is the child of freedom, never that of domination.”
― Erich Fromm

233. “Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed, truly human man.”
― Erich Fromm

234. “All this kind of relationship amounts to is the well‑oiled relationship between two persons who remain strangers all their lives, who never arrive at a “central relationship,” but who treat each other with courtesy and who attempt to make each other feel better.”
― Erich Fromm

235. “looking for the next thing to do or the newest gadget to use is only a means of protecting oneself from being close to oneself or to another person.”
― Erich Fromm

236. “But in many individuals in whom separateness is not relieved in other ways, the search for the sexual orgasm assumes a function which makes it not very different from alcoholism and drug addiction. It becomes a desperate attempt to escape the anxiety engendered by separateness, and it results in an ever-increasing sense of separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily. All”
― Erich Fromm

237. “ان نمط الحياة الذي يتحدد للفرد عن طريق تفردية نظام اقتصادي يصبح العامل الاولي في تحديد بناء شخصيته الكلية, وذلك لان الحاجة الملحة للحفاظ على الذات ترغمه على تقبل الظروف التي عليه ان يعيش في ظلها.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

238. “ان نوع التعلق بالعالم قد يكون نبيلا او تافها, ولكن التعلق حتى بادنى نوع للانموذج مفضل اكثر على العزلة. ان الدين والقومية, وكذلك اية عادة واي معتقد مهما يكن عبثا ومحطا ان كان يربط الفرد بالآخرين هي ملاجئ مما يخشاه الانسان ايما خشية: العزلة.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

239. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

240. “يحدث التغير في الوظيفة عندما يتوقف التملك عن كونه وسيلة للشعور بحيوية وإنتاجية أعظم, ويتحول إلى وسيلة للاستهلاك السلبي الحسي. عندما تكون وظيفة التملك الأساسية إرضاء حاجات الاستهلاك المتزايدة, فإنه (أي التملك) سيتوقف عن كونه حالة تضيف إلى “الكينونة”, ولن يختلف عن “الامتلاك التوفيري”.”
― Erich Fromm

241. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

242. “The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love”
― Erich Fromm

243. “We have seen, then, that certain socioeconomic changes, notably the decline of the middle class and the rising power of monopolistic capital, had a deep psychological effect… Nazism resurrected the lower middle class psychologically while participating in the destruction of its old socioeconomic position. It mobilized its emotional energies to become an important force in the struggle for the economic and political aims of Germain imperialism.”
― Erich Fromm

244. “They were more free, but they were more alone.”
― Erich Fromm

245. “There were always men who looked beyond the dimensions of their own society- and while they may have been called fools or criminals in their time they are the roster of great men as far as the record of human history is concerned- and visualized something which can be called universally human and which is not identical with what a particular society assumes human nature to be. There were always men who were bold and imaginative enough to see beyond the frontiers of their own existence.”
― Erich Fromm

246. “At the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it.”
― Erich Fromm

247. “How should a man caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and of separateness?”
― Erich Fromm

248. “The question is the same, for it springs from the same ground: the human situation, the conditions of the human existence. The answer varies. The question can be answered by animal worship, by human scrifice or military conquest, by indulgence in luxury, by ascetic renunciation, by obsessionnal work, by artistic creation, by the love of God, and by the love of Man.”
― Erich Fromm

249. “The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love—is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.”
― Erich Fromm

250. “There is only one passion which satisfies man’s need to unite himself with the world, and to acquire at the same time a sense of integrity and individuality, and this is love. Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self. It is an experience of sharing, of communion, which permits the full unfolding of one’s own inner activity. The experience of love does away with the necessity of illusions. There is no need to inflate the image of the other person, or of myself, since the reality of active sharing and loving permits me to transcend my individualized existence, and at the same time to experience myself as the bearer of the active powers which constitute the act of loving. What”
― Erich Fromm

251. “Freedom is not something we have, there is no such thing as freedom. Freedom is a quality of our personality: we are more or less free to resist pressure, more or less free to do what we want and to be ourselves. Freedom is always a question of increasing freedom one has, or decreasing it.”
― Erich Fromm

252. “لعل من الطريف فى هذا الصدد أن نذكر هنا أن أحد المؤرخين الثقاة يؤكد لنا أنه فيما بين عام 1500 و 1860 بعد الميلاد وقعت الدول ما ينيف عن ثمانية آلاف معاهدة للصلح، تهدف كل منها إلى سيادة السلام الدائم بين الشعوب، ولم تدم واحدة منها أكثر من عامين !”
― Erich Fromm

253. “إننا لا ننكر أن الإنسانية وسط هذا الضجيج والعجيج لا تعدم نفراً من العقلاء بنادون بعقد معاهدات الصلح ونشر ألوية السلام فى ربوع العالم بأسره. غير أن قصارى ما يبذله هؤلاء العقلاء من جهد لا يعدو أن يكون كلمات مكتوبة وحبراً على ورق. لعل من الطريف فى هذا الصدد أن نذكر هنا أن أحد المؤرخين الثقاة يؤكد لنا أنه فيما بين عام 1500 و 1860 بعد الميلاد وقعت الدول ما ينيف عن ثمانية آلاف معاهدة للصلح، تهدف كل منها إلى سيادة السلام الدائم بين الشعوب، ولم تدم واحدة منها أكثر من عامين !”
― Erich Fromm

254. “يقوم خضوع الفرد كوسيلة للغايات الاقتصادية على اساس خصائص متفردة لنمط الانتاج الرأسمالي, الذي يجعل تراكم رأس المال غرض وهدف النشاط الاقتصادي. ان الانسان يعمل من اجل الربح, لكن الربح الذي يحققه الفرد يتم لا لكي يجري انفاقه بل لكي يجري استثماره كرأس مال جديد, هذا الرأس مال المتزايد يحقق ارباحا جديدة تستثمر من جديد وهكذا في حلقة دائرية. لقد كان هناك بالطبع دائما رأسماليون ينفقون المال من اجل الترف او كـ “فشخرة”, ولكن الممثلين الكلاسيكيين للرأسمالية يستمتعون بالعمل لا بالانفاق. هذا المبدأ الخاص بمراكمة رأس المال بدلا من استخدامه في الاستهلاك هو مقدمة الانجازات الهائلة لنظامنا الصناعي الحديث. لو لم يكن لدى الانسان نظرة التقشف الى العمل والرغبة في استثمار عمله بهدف تطوير القوى الانتاجية للنظام الاقتصادي, ما كان ليتم اطلاقا تقدمنا في السيطرة على الطبيعة, ان نمو قوى الانتاج هذا للمجتمع هو الذي سمح لاول مرة في التاريخ تصور مستقبل يكف فيه الصراع المتصل به من اجل اشباع الحاجات المادية. ومع هذا , بينما مبدأ العمل من اجل مراكمة رأس المال ذو قيمة هائلة موضوعيا لتقدم البشرية, فقد جعل الانسان – من الناحية السيكولوجية- يعمل من اجل اغراض تعلو النطاق الشخصي, جعلته خادما للآلة التي صنعها, ومن ثم قد اعطته شعورا باللاجدوى والعجز الشخصيين.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

255. “Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as “love.” “Love” is abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing.”
― Erich Fromm

256. “Naces solo y mueres solo, y en el paréntesis la soledad es tan grande que necesitas compartir la vida para olvidarlo.”
― Erich Fromm

257. “ما هو معنى حرية الانسان الحديث ؟
لقد اصبح متحررا من القيود الخارجية التي قد تمنعه من الفعل والتفكير حسبما يرى. انه حر في ان يتصرف حسب ارادته اذا عرف ما يريده وما يفكر فيه وما يشعر فيه. لكنه لا يعرف. انه يتطابق مع سلطات مجهولة ويعتنق نفسا ليست نفسه. وكلما فعل هذا شعر بعجز اشد, واضطر اكثر الى التطابق. وبالرغم من وجود قشرة تفاؤل ومبادرة, فان الانسان الحديث مقهور بشعور عميق بالعجز الذي يجعله يحدق في الكوارث القادمة كما لو كان مشلولا.
اننا اذا نظرنا الى الناس من السطح فانهم يبدون انهم يؤدون وظائفهم بشكل طيب في الحياة الاقتصادية والاجتماعية, ومع هذا سيكون من الخطر تجاوز الشقاء الضارب في الاعماق والراسخ وراء قشرة التطابق هذه. اذا فقدت الحياة معناها لانها لم تعش فان الانسان يصبح يائسا.
والناس لا يموتون تماما من المسغبة الفيزيائية, كما انهم لا يموتون تماما من المسغبة النفسية بالمثل. واذا نظرنا فحسب في الحاجات الاقتصادية بالقدر الذي يهم الشخص “السوي” واذا لم نر المعاناة اللاشعورية للشخص المتوسط الذي اصبح كالذرة اذن فاننا نفشل في تبين الخطر الذي يهدد خضارتنا من اساسها الانساني: الاستعداد لتقبل اية اديولوجية واي زعيم اذا ما وعد فحسب بالاثارة وقدم بناء سياسيا ورموزا تعطي معنى ونظاما استعماريين لحياة فرد. ان يأس الانسان الآلي الانساني هو ارض خصبة للامراض السياسية الفاشية.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

258. “ان شعور الانسان الحديث بالعزلة والعجز لا يزال يزداد من جراء الطابع الذي توجده جميع علاقاته الانسانية. لقد فقدت العلاقة العينية للفرد مع الآخر طابعها المباشر والانساني واصبح لهذا الطابع روح الاستغلال وتحويل كل شيء الى آلة. وفي جميع العلاقات الاجتماعية والشخصية نجد ان قوانين السوق هي القاعدة. ومن الواضح ان العلاقة بين المتنافسين يجب ان تقوم على عدم الاكتراث الانساني المتبادل والا فان اي واحد منهم سيصاب بشلل في تحقيق مهامه الاقتصادية – ومن هنا تأتي محاربة كل منهم للآخرين وعدم الامتناع عن التدمير الاقتصادي الفعلي لكل منهم اذا اقتضت الضرورة.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

259. “One can hardly overestimate people’s need to talk about themselves and to be listened to.”
― Erich Fromm

260. “If I am nothing but what I believe I am supposed to be—who am “I”?”
― Erich Fromm

261. “What matters is the effect, not the process.”
― Erich Fromm

262. “أن الحب فن تماما كما أن الحياة فن,اذا أردنا أن نتعلم كيف نحب فعلينا أن ننطلق بالطريقة عينها التي ننطلق بها اذا أردنا أن نتعلم أي فن آخر كالموسيقى أو الرسم أو النجارة أو فن التطيب أو الهندسة.”
― إريك فروم

263. “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”
― Erich Fromm

264. “والسلطة ليس من الضروري ان تكون شخصا او مؤسسة تقول: عليك ان تفعل هذا او انت ليس مسموحا لك بذاك.
فبينما قد يسمى مثل هذا النوع للسلطة بالسلطة الخارجية, يمكن للسلطة ان تظهر كلسطة باطنية, تحت اسم الواجب او الضمير او الانا الاعلى. وكحقيقة واقعة, فان تطور التفكير الحديث من البروتستنتانية الى فلسفة كانت يمكن ان يتصف بانه احلال للسلطة الباطنية محل السلطة الخارجية . فمع الانتصارات السياسية للطبقة الوسطى الصاعدة, فقدت السلطة الخارجية مكانتها واحتل ضمير الانسان المكان الذي كانت تشغله السلطة الخارجية. ولقد بدا هذا التغير للكثيرين على انه انتصار الحرية. ان الخضوع للاوامر من الخارج (على الاقل في المسائل الروحية) بدا غير جدير بالانسان الحر, ولكن قهر متضمناته الطبيعية واقامة هيمنة على جانب من الفرد, طبيعته, عن طريق جانب آخر, عقله او ارادته او ضميره, يبدو انه الماهية القصوى للحرية. ان التحليل يبين ان الضمير يحكم بقوة مثله في هذا مثل السلطات الخارجية تماما, بل الازيد من هذا انه كثيرا ما تكون محتويات الاوامر الصادرة عن ضمير الانسان غير محكومة بالمرة بمطالب النفس الفردية بل بالمطالب الاجتماعية التي تفرض كرامة المعايير الخلقية. ان حكم الضمير يمكن حتى ان يكون اشد قسوة من السلطات الخارجية نظرا لان الفرد يشعر بأوامره على انها اوامره هو, فكيف يمكن ان ينمرد ضد نفسه ؟”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

265. “The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice.”
― Erich Fromm

266. “Aliveness always makes a beautiful.”
― Erich Fromm

267. “The analysis of the psychological motivations behind certain doctrines or ideas can never be a substitute for a rational judgment of the validity of the doctrine and of the values which it implies, although such analysis may lead to a better understanding of the real meaning of a doctrine and thereby influence one’s value judgment.
What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make him seek for answers in certain directions. Any kind of thought, true or false, if it is more than a superficial conformance with conventional ideas, 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. But in both cases the psychological motivations are important incentives for arriving at certain conclusions. We can go even further and say that ideas which are not rooted in powerful needs of the personality will have little influence on the actions and on the whole life of the person concerned.”
― Erich Fromm

268. “My duty not to remain passive in a world which seems to be moving toward self-chosen catastrophe.”
― Erich Fromm

269. “The unity achieved in productive work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is transitory; the unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence, they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love.”
― Erich Fromm

270. “If it is true that the ability to be puzzled is the beginning of wisdom, then this truth is a sad commentary on the wisdom of modern man. Whatever the merits of our high degree of literary and universal education, we have lost the gift for being puzzled. Everything is supposed to be known—if not to ourselves then to some specialist whose business it is to know what we do not know. In fact, to be puzzled is embarrassing, a sign of intellectual inferiority. Even children are rarely surprised, or at least they try not to show that they are; and as we grow older we gradually lose the ability to be surprised. To have the right answers seems all-important; to ask the right questions is considered insignificant by comparison.”
― Erich Fromm

271. “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.”
― Erich Fromm

272. “This popular picture of Marx’s ‘materialism’ – his anti-spiritual tendency, his wish for uniformity and subordination – is utterly false. Marx’s aim was that of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains of economic determination, of restituting him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature. Marx’s philosophy was, in secular, nontheistic language, a new and radical step forward in the tradition of prophetic Messianism; it was aimed at the full realization of individualism, the very aim which has guided Western thinking from the Renaissance and the Reformation far into the nineteenth century.”
― Erich Fromm

273. “I wonder sometimes whether a person has to become insane these days in order to feel certain things. Lessing once said, “Who doesn’t become insane over certain things, has no sanity to lose,”
― Erich Fromm

274. “The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other.”
― Erich Fromm

275. “Selfishness is not identical with self-love but with its very opposite. Selfishness is one kind of greediness. Like all greediness, it contains an insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”
― Erich Fromm

276. “والقول بان الانسان لا يجب ان يخضع لاي شيء سوى نفسه لا ينكر كرامة المثل. بل العكس, انه اقوى تاكيد للمثل. وعلى اية حال يضطرنا هذا الى تحليل نقدي للمثال. بصفة عامة الانسان معرض اليوم الى افتراض ان المثال هو اي هدف لا تضمن تحقيقه اي كسب مادي وهو شيء يكون الشخص مستعدا من اجله للتضحية بكل الغايات الانانية. وهذا مفهوم سيكولوجي محض للمثال ولهذا فهو مفهوم نسبي. من وجهة النظر الذاتية هذه يكون للفاشستي الذي ينساق برغبة اخضاع نفسه لقوة اعلى وفي الوقت نفسه يتسير بالقوة على الآخرين, مثال شأنه في هذا شأن الانسان الذي يناضل من اجل المساواة والحرية الانسانيتين. وعلى هذا الاساس لا يمكن اطلاقا حل مشكلة المثل.”
― اريك فروم, الخوف من الحرية

277. “Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.”
― Erich Fromm

278. “In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. “Having faith” in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change.”
― Erich Fromm

279. “If a person does not emerge from incestuous attachment to mother, clan, nation, if he retains the childish dependence on a punishing and rewarding father, or any other authority, he cannot develop a more mature love for God; then his religion is that of the earlier phase of religion, in which God was experienced as an all-protective mother or a punishing rewarding father. In”
― Erich Fromm

280. “Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of destruction.”
― Erich Fromm

281. “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

282. “Existuje ještě jeden další rozdíl mezi logikou zjevného a skrytého vyprávění. Ve zjevném vyprávění existuje logická kauzální souvislost mezi vnějšími událostmi. Jonáš chce plout přes moře, protože chce utéci před Bohem, usne, protože je unaven, je vržen přes palubu, protože je považován za příčinu bouře a je pozřen rybou, protože se v moři vyskytují dravé ryby. Jedna událost vyplývá z předcházející. (Poslední část příběhu je sice nerealistická, ale nikoliv nelogická.) Ve skrytém příběhu naproti tomu vládne jiný druh logiky. Různé události jsou asociací spojeny se stejným vnitřním zážitkem. To, co se jeví jako kauzální posloupnost vnějších událostí, vlastně zastupuje spojení zážitků propojených jako události vnitřní. Je to právě tak logické, jako je logický zjevný příběh, ale jede tu o jiný druh logiky.”
― Erich Fromm

283. “Si percibo en otra persona nada más que lo superficial, percibo principalmente las diferencias, lo que nos separa. Si penetro hasta el núcleo, percibo nuestra identidad, el hecho de nuestra hermandad.”
― Erich Fromm

284. “The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either.”
― Erich Fromm

285. “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

286. “Only dogmatic thinking, the result of the laziness of mind and heart, tries to construct simplistic schemes of the either-or type that block any real understanding.”
― Erich Fromm

287. “Jesus and Satan appear here as repre sentatives of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and Man. Jesus is the representative of being, and of the idea that not-having is the premise for being. The world has followed Satan’s principles, since the time of the gospels.”
― Erich Fromm

288. “The sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily..”
― Erich Fromm

289. “To be naive and easily deceived is impermissible, today more than ever, when the prevailing untruths may lead to a catastrophe because they blind people to real dangers and real possibilities.”
― Erich Fromm

290. “modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.”
― Erich Fromm

291. “A free person owes an explanation only to himself, to his reason and his conscious, and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.”
― Erich Fromm

292. “Sanity – that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.”
― Erich Fromm

293. “If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune.”
― Erich Fromm

294. “[Der Mensch] würde dem Wahnsinn verfallen, wenn er sich nicht aus diesem Gefängnis befreien könnte – wenn er nicht in irgendeiner Form seine Hände nach anderen Menschen ausstrecken und sich mit der Welt außerhalb seiner selbst vereinigen könnte.”
― Erich Fromm

295. “Die heutige Gesellschaft predigt das Ideal einer nicht-individualisierten Gleichheit, weil sie menschliche Atome braucht, die sich untereinander völlig gleichen, damit sie im Massenbetrieb glatt und reibungslos funktionieren, damit alle den gleichen Anweisungen folgen und jeder trotzdem überzeugt ist, das zu tun, was er will. Genauso wie die moderne Massenproduktion die Standardisierung der Erzeugnisse verlangt, so verlangt auch der gesellschaftliche Prozess die Standardisierung des Menschen, und diese Standardisierung nennt man dann “Gleichheit”.”
― Erich Fromm

296. “[Erkenntnis] ist nur möglich, wenn ich mein eigenes Interesse transzendiere und den anderen so sehe, wie er wirklich ist.”
― Erich Fromm

297. “To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid.”
― Erich Fromm

298. “Man schließt zu zweit einen Bund gegen die Welt und hält dann diesen égoisme à deux irrtümlich für Liebe und Vertrautheit.”
― Erich Fromm

299. “Free man is by necessity insecure; thinking man by necessity uncertain.”
― Erich Fromm

300. “Few parents have the courage and independence to care more for their children’s happiness than for their success.”
― Erich Fromm