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There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

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
Hardly
Enterprise
Expectations
Activity
Regularly
Failing
Fails
Started
Hopes
Hope
Love
Tremendous

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The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
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If you take a salesman, who sells a useless commodity, he feels like a fraud.
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The state of sleep is a state of freedom in which man is not occupied with the manipulation of the outside world.
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Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.
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There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
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Creativity is the ability to see and to respond.
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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.
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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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If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.
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Freedom does not mean license.
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I would say love is something everybody talks about, and the need for love is one of the most basic needs of man, namely the experience of union with another being - of becoming one with another being.
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If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
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Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
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To be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this, or that - there is always a fear that love could disappear.
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To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
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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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Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
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It is essential... that discipline should not be practised like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one's own will that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behaviour which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practising it.
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I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence he is aware of others as others man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought.
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Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers who want to consume more and more and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated ... what is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow man and from nature.
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