Quote

Independent of others and in concert with others, your main task in life is to do what you can best do and become what you can potentially be.

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
Become
Potentially
Best
Concert
Life
Concerts
Task
Main
Tasks
Independent

More quotes by Erich Fromm

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If you do not smile, you are judged lacking in a 'pleasing personality' - and you need to have a pleasing personality if you want to sell your services, whether as a waitress, a salesman, or a physician.
Erich Fromm
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I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is, they would say, if they are honest, that it is a big department store, with new things every week - all the money to buy them, and maybe a little more than the neighbours.
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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A vast sector of modern advertising... does not appeal to reason but to emotion like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm
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Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life
Erich Fromm
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Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.
Erich Fromm
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We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
Erich Fromm
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If the Russians claim they are Socialist, this is just, I would say, a lie. They have no socialism at all. They have what I would call a state capitalism.
Erich Fromm
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Respect is not fear and awe it...[is]the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.
Erich Fromm
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Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.
Erich Fromm
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People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love , power , fame , revenge . Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent.
Erich Fromm
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Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves.
Erich Fromm
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Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
Erich Fromm
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The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a loving mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.
Erich Fromm
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The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.
Erich Fromm
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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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Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity, in the many ways in which such violation is possible.
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm
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We have a religious renaissance today in America, as many people say. I would say this religious renaissance, ninety percent of it is the greatest danger true religious experience has ever been confronted with.
Erich Fromm