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Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.

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
People
Primarily
Hence
Loving
Capacity
Loved
Rather
Problem
Love
Lovable

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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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An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.
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Happiness is a very proud word of our whole cultural heritage.
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The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy.
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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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Finally one arrives at this: the state of sleep has an ambiguous function in sleep, the lack of contact with the culture brings out the worst and also the best in us.
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[Sigmund ] Freud assumes that every dream represents the satisfaction of adesire and in the last analysis, of a sexual desire that has its roots in infancy.
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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.
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That is not quite enough to make one happy, if one spends eight hours a day in something which in itself has no meaning and interest, except that one gains money from it.
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To take the difficulties, setbacks and sorrows of life as a challenge to overcome makes us stronger, rather than unjust punishment which should not happen to us, requires faith and courage.
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There is only one reality: the act of feeling ourselves in the process of making choices.
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If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
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Man absolutely cannot live by himself.
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We all dream we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.
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Society must be organized in such a way that mans social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.
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Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality - or as one says sometimes, our personality package - for something.
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