Erich Fromm Quotes – City of Quotes

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Erich Seligmann Fromm was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was one of the Founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.LifeErich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents. He started his academic studies in 1918 at the University of Frankfurt am Main with two semesters of jurisprudence. During the summer semester of 1919, Fromm studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he began studying sociology under Alfred Weber , psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert. Fromm received his PhD in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922.

Erich Fromm

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.

Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’

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

The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

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.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

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

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

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

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

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

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.

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.