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Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?..Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission?

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
Become
Burden
Also
Bear
Trying
Heavy
Instinctive
Something
Bears
Submission
Men
Perhaps
Innate
Freedom
Besides
Wish
Tries
Desire
Escape

More quotes by Erich Fromm

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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
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I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion.
Erich Fromm
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That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Erich Fromm
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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
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I would define myself as a Marxian, and that means of course also as a humanist.
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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According to me [Sigmund ] Freud did not notice that the dream expresses the inner experiences in a symbolic form,resembling in that, poetry or other art forms.
Erich Fromm
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People do not see that the main question is not : Am I loved? which is to a large extent the question : Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired? The main question is: Can I love?
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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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
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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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When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.
Erich Fromm
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Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.
Erich Fromm
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Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm
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In fact, there are very important writings of Marx which are not even translated into English.
Erich Fromm
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There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.
Erich Fromm
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Creativity is the ability to see and to respond.
Erich Fromm
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To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
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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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