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While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person.

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
Humans
Development
Important
Teach
Knowledge
Simple
Mature
Given
Presence
Persons
Loving
Person
Losing
Human
Teaching

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Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
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I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion.
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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.
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Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.
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It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.
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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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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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. . . 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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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.
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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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Man absolutely cannot live by himself.
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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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We talk about equality, about happiness, about freedom - and about the spiritual values of religion, and about God - and in our daily life, we act on principles which are different, and partly contradictory.
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The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person and him of great joy is the difference between get and give.
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Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
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I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.
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Creativity is the ability to see and to respond.
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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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The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.
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I would define myself as a Marxian, and that means of course also as a humanist.
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