Best 508 quotes of Erich Fromm on MyQuotes

Erich Fromm

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    Erich Fromm

    According to me [Sigmund ] Freud did not notice that the dream expresses the inner experiences in a symbolic form,resembling in that, poetry or other art forms.

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    Erich Fromm

    Actually, if you take the average American, and studies have shown that, he is really concerned only with private affairs; that is to say, with his health, his money and family affairs.

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    Erich Fromm

    A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.

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    Erich Fromm

    All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual.

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    Erich Fromm

    All great art is by its very essence in conflict with the society with which it exists. It expresses the truth about the existence regardless of whether this truth serves or hinders the survival purpose of a given society. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.

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    Erich Fromm

    All men are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual.

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    Erich Fromm

    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.

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    Erich Fromm

    A new question has arisen in modern man's mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living...No sensible answer can be given to the question...because the question does not make any sense.

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    Erich Fromm

    Another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals, which they serve.

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    Erich Fromm

    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.

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    Erich Fromm

    A relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading radio-listening culture.

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    Erich Fromm

    As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found- in himself.

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    Erich Fromm

    A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.

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    Erich Fromm

    As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.

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    Erich Fromm

    A vast sector of modern advertising... does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.

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    Erich Fromm

    Basically, there can only be two answers. One is to overcome separateness and find unity by regression to the state of unity which existed before awareness ever arose, that is, before man was born. The other answer is to be fully born, to develop one's awareness, one's reason, one's capacity to love to such a point that one transcends one's own egocentric involvement, and arrives at a new harmony, at a new oneness with the world.

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    Erich Fromm

    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

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    Erich Fromm

    Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of unaliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it.

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    Erich Fromm

    Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers.

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    Erich Fromm

    Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.

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    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.

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    Erich Fromm

    But not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man.

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    Erich Fromm

    By equality, one once understood equality in the very same sense in which the Bible speaks of equality: that we are all equal, inasmuch as we are created in the image of God.

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    Erich Fromm

    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 an 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.

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    Erich Fromm

    Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.

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    Erich Fromm

    [Carl Gustav] Jung was not right when he said that the unconscious message is always written clearly and so there is no need to seek to discover the distortions, because one must recognize that many dreams are more or less distortions.

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    Erich Fromm

    Chronic boredom compensated or uncompensated constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.

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    Erich Fromm

    Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you'll live as you've never lived before.

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    Erich Fromm

    Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.

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    Erich Fromm

    Creativity is the ability to see and to respond.

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    Erich Fromm

    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

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    Erich Fromm

    Death is never sweet, not even if it is suffered for the highest ideal.

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    Erich Fromm

    Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.

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    Erich Fromm

    Education is helping the child realise his potentialities.

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    Erich Fromm

    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.

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    Erich Fromm

    Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.

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    Erich Fromm

    Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion. 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.

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    Erich Fromm

    Equality today means ‘sameness’, rather than ‘oneness’.

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    Erich Fromm

    Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.

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    Erich Fromm

    Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life.

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    Erich Fromm

    Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.

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    Erich Fromm

    Every act of irreverence for life, every act which neglects life, which is indifferent to and wastes life, is a step towards the love of death. This choice man must make at every minute. Never were the consequences of the wrong choice as total and as irreversible as they are today. Never was the warning of the Bible so urgent: 'I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live.'

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    Erich Fromm

    Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.

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    Erich Fromm

    Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself.

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    Erich Fromm

    Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer.

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    Erich Fromm

    Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings.

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    Erich Fromm

    Faith is not a weak form of belief or knowledge; it is not faith in this or that; faith is the conviction about the not yet proven, the knowledge of the real possibility, the awareness of pregnancy.

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    Erich Fromm

    Finally one arrives at this: the state of sleep has an ambiguous function; in sleep, the lack of contact with the culture brings out the worst and also the best in us.

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    Erich Fromm

    For [Karl] Marx it is socialist society which realizes "concretely" the religious principles of equality, brotherly love, and freedom.

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    Erich Fromm

    For [Karl] Marx what counts is man. He is the root of everything;while for capitalism, the aim are things, profit, and man is only a means to gain them. As an authentically religious individual, Marx could not be other than against "religion".