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Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.
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
Defined
Aware
Identity
Awareness
Animal
May
Entity
Men
Sane
Separate
More quotes by Erich Fromm
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
Erich Fromm
The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense of life.
Erich Fromm
[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.
Erich Fromm
Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.
Erich Fromm
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
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.
Erich Fromm
Beyond the element of giving, the active characteristic of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsability, respect and knowledge
Erich Fromm
I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way.
Erich Fromm
What is common to our societies is the development into a managed mass society, with big bureaucracy, managing people. The Russians do it by force. We do it by persuasion.
Erich Fromm
Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience we forget what we knew in our dream.
Erich Fromm
You have to stop in order to change direction.
Erich Fromm
A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.
Erich Fromm
The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.
Erich Fromm
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Erich Fromm
There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
Erich Fromm
The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high it is the loss of his self.
Erich Fromm
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.
Erich Fromm
We are all equal in the sense that no man must mean - must be - the means for the purposes of another man but each individual is an end in itself.
Erich Fromm
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.
Erich Fromm
The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.
Erich Fromm
