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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
Others
Enlarged
Persons
Egoism
Person
Narcissistic
Love
Egotism
Life
Attachment
Indifferent
Symbiotic
Indifference
Symbiosis
Loves
Psychoanalytic

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To be concentrated means to live fully in the present.
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We've wanted to produce more in the 19th century and the 20th century in order to give man the possibility for more dignified human life but actually what has happened is that production and consumption have become means - have ceased to be means and have become ends, and we are production crazy and consumption crazy.
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Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.
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Whether...a change from the supremacy of natural science to a new social science will take place...depends on one factor: how many brilliant, learned, disciplined, and caring men and women are attracted by the new challenge.
Erich Fromm
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Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.
Erich Fromm
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In the sleeping state, instead, one is much more oneself, even if society never ceases to intervene.
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Our vitality, and the vitality of each nation, rests on the sincerity and depth of the faith in the ideas which it announces, or pronounces.
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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.
Erich Fromm
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I think American man unconsciously hates his work very often, because he feels trapped by it... imprisoned by it... because he feels that he is spending most of his energy for something which has no meaning in itself.
Erich Fromm
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In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
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If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
Erich Fromm
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Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?..Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission?
Erich Fromm
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I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion.
Erich Fromm
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Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.
Erich Fromm
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When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.
Erich Fromm
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The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
Erich Fromm
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In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.
Erich Fromm
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Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality - or as one says sometimes, our personality package - for something.
Erich Fromm
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I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity.
Erich Fromm
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Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.
Erich Fromm