Quotes from Erich Fromm

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

The doubt itself will not disappear as long as man does not overcome his isolation and as long as his place in the world has not become a meaningful one in terms of his human needs.

The idea that one can build peace while encouraging the striving for possession and profit is an illusion, and a dangerous one, because it deprives people of recognizing that they are confronted with a clear alternative: either a radical change of their character or the perpetuity of war.

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.

Obsessional work alone would drive people just as crazy as would complete laziness

Know thyself is one of the fundamental commands that aim at human strength and happiness.

Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being—and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being. In essence, all human beings are identical. We are all part of One; we are One.

Das Wesentliche an der Existenz des Menschen ist ja, dass er sich über das Tierreich und seine instiktive Anpassung erhoben hat, dass er die Natur transzendiert hat, wenn er sie auch nie ganz verlässt.

Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown.

The passion for having must lead to never-ending class war. The pretense of the communists that their system will end class struggle by abolishing classes is fiction, for their system is based on the principle of unlimited consumption as the goal of living. As long as everybody wants to have more, there must be formations of classes, there must be class war, and in global terms, there must be international war. Greed and peace preclude each other.

The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness. Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one's love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God.

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

Nesmíme také zapomenout, že masochistické ponížení není opakem sadismu, ale sou?ástí symbiotického systému, v nÄ›mž úplné ovládání a úplné pokoÃ…â"¢ení jsou projevy téže hluboce uložené neschopnosti prožívat plnÄ› sv?j život.

The capacity to see and—equally so—blindness are not divisible. The critical faculty of the human mind is one: To believe one can be seeing internally but blind as far as the outside world is concerned is like saying that the light of a candle gives light only in one direction and not in all. The light of the candle is reason's capacity for critical, penetrating, uncovering thought.

When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the past—and about the future only as far as that it is death.

Not only thinking and feeling are determined by man's character structure but also his actions.

El pensamiento crítico es la única arma y la única defensa que tiene el ser humano frente a los peligros de la vida. Porque si yo no pienso críticamente, estaré sujeto a todas las influencias, a todas las sugerencias, a todos los errores y a todas las mentiras que se difunden, y con lo que me han adoctrinado desde pequeño. (...)

La menzogna può legare a un partito, ma solo la verità in ultima analisi porta alla liberazione dell'uomo. Troppi tuttavia sono colore che hanno paura della libertà e preferiscono l'illusione.

Wer bin ich, wenn ich bin, was ich habe und dann verliere, was ich habe?

That human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and hence that a whole society can be sick, is an assumption which was made very explicitly by Freud, most extensively in his Civilization and Its Discontent.

Die Entwicklung der patriarchalischen Gesellschaft geht Hand in Hand mit der Entwicklung des Privateigentums

Auf ihrer Suche nach der Einheit hinter der Mannigfaltigkeit kamen die brahmanischen Denker zu dem Schluss, dass das von ihnen wahrgenommene Gegensatzpaar nicht das Wesen der Dinge, sondern das Wesen des wahrnehmenden Geistes widerspiegelt. Das wahrnehmende Denken muss sich selbst transzendieren, um die wahre Wirklichkeit zu erreichen. Der Widerspruch ist eine Kategorie des menschlichen Geistes und nicht an und für sich ein Element der Wirklichkeit.

Care, responsibility, respect and knowledge are mutually interdependent. They are a syndrome of attitudes which are to be found in the mature person; that is, in the person who develops his own powers productively, who only wants to have that which he has worked for, who has given up narcissistic dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, who has acquired humility based on the inner strength which only genuine productive activity can give.

Vernunft ist die Fähigkeit, objektiv zu denken. Die ihr zugrunde liegende Haltung ist die Demut.