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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.

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
Born
Means
Desperate
Moments
Lifetime
Become
Birth
Mean
Ready
Every
Hell
Moment
Hope

More quotes by Erich Fromm

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The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.
Erich Fromm
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Happiness is a very proud word of our whole cultural heritage.
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. . . freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.
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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.
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When an individual is awake, almost all he does and says is inspired by the model of behavior that the society imposes,even without his being aware of it.
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We are concerned with things. We are concerned with success. We are concerned with money. We are concerned with instrumentalities.
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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.
Erich Fromm
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Jewish legend says that the world rests on 36 just men: only thirty six, but their moral strength is immense.
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The average American has separated his private life from his existence as a member of his society, and leaves that to the specialists in the government to take care of.
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If you take a salesman, who sells a useless commodity, he feels like a fraud.
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Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.
Erich Fromm
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A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.
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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.
Erich Fromm
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I need you because I love you.
Erich Fromm
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I think we got off the track, as many societies do, who follow successfully one aim, and yet are not capable of seeing at what point the pursuit of this aim prevents them from following a more total aim. That is to say, they get into a blind alley.
Erich Fromm
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We are terribly imaginative, as far as technique in science is concerned. As far as changes in social arrangements are concerned, we lack utterly in imagination.
Erich Fromm
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The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs.... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.
Erich Fromm
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Once they are through the process of education, most people lose the capacity of wondering, of being surprised. They feel they ought to know everything, and hence that it is a sign of ignorance to be surprised or puzzled by anything.
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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.
Erich Fromm
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If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love.
Erich Fromm