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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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Erich Fromm
Age: 79 †
Born: 1900
Born: March 23
Died: 1980
Died: March 18
Philosopher
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Long
Running
Basic
Love
Shows
Tried
Excludes
Life
True
Answer
Satisfactory
Nature
Development
Necessities
Problem
Answers
Perish
Human
Existence
Relatively
Humans
Society
Sane
Must
Show
Contradiction

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You have to stop to change direction.
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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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Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
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Loving becomes, and the ability to love, becomes one of the most important things in life.
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The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.
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The fact is that the culture does not have only positive effects on our intellectual and moral functions but also negative effects.
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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.
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That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
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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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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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I want to mention that Marx shares something, if you don't mind the comparison, with the Old Testament: many people talk about him, but nobody has read him.
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The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.
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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.
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Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.
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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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Man always dies before he is fully born.
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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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Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.
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Love is active penetration of the other person, in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody - and I know nothing.
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Having lost religious faith and the humanistic values bound up with it, he [man] concentrated on technical and material values and lost the capacity for deep emotional experiences, for the joy and sadness that accompany them.
Erich Fromm