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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.

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
Persons
Penetration
Person
Fusion
Nothing
Union
Love
Unions
Active
Everybody
Knowledge
Desire
Stilled

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The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
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Infantile love follows the principle: I love because I am loved. Mature love follows the principle: I am loved because I love. Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need you because I love you.
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In times of change, learners inherit the earth
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That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
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Modern man is assailed on every side and almost without interruption by noise - of the radio, of television, of headlines, of advertising and of the cinema - of which the greatest part, far from enlightening the mind, blunts and stultifies it.
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Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.
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When people can't handle God any more, they turn to religion.
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The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become ''Golems',' they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.
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Jewish legend says that the world rests on 36 just men: only thirty six, but their moral strength is immense.
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Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.
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I think American man unconsciously hates his work very often, because he feels trapped by it... imprisoned by it... because he feels that he is spending most of his energy for something which has no meaning in itself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.
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Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.
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To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.
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Having lost religious faith and the humanistic values bound up with it, he [man] concentrated on technical and material values and lost the capacity for deep emotional experiences, for the joy and sadness that accompany them.
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Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
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The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
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