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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

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Erich Fromm
Age: 79 †
Born: 1900
Born: March 23
Died: 1980
Died: March 18
Philosopher
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Love
Egotism
Life
Attachment
Indifferent
Symbiotic
Indifference
Symbiosis
Loves
Psychoanalytic
Others
Enlarged
Persons
Egoism
Person
Narcissistic

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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.
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Man today being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little engergy time to devote himself to the true religious experience.
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The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
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Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
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In fact, there are very important writings of Marx which are not even translated into English.
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I would say, compared with the 19th century, compared with most previous history, this is as good or better a society than any which man has ever made. But that doesn't mean it is such a good one.
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People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love , power , fame , revenge . Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent.
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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.
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We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree to 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 love.
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[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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It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
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It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.
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The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.
Erich Fromm
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I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is, they would say, if they are honest, that it is a big department store, with new things every week - all the money to buy them, and maybe a little more than the neighbours.
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm
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[Sigmund ] Freud did not under-stand that the dream is a highly creative act, written in the universal language of symbolism, and only secondarily does censorship distort those parts that the subject refuses to accept even in sleep.
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Mobilizing the love of life is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead.
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Love is an active power in man a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unite him with others love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity.
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The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology.
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You have to stop in order to change direction.
Erich Fromm