Erich Fromm quotes

“What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.”

— Erich Fromm

“Man always dies before he is fully born.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

“To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.”

— Erich Fromm

“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

“Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.”

— Erich Fromm

“The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.”

— Erich Fromm

“Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.”

— Erich Fromm

“The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

“Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.”

— Erich Fromm

“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

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

— Erich Fromm

“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

“Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.”

— Erich Fromm

“Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.”

— Erich Fromm