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I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity.

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
Human
Potential
Humans
Development
Believe
Humanity
Furthers
Way
Path
Impedes
Seeing
Transcending
Society
Enter
Individual
Intimate
Cannot
Contact

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The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
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Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous.
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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.
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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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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.
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You have to stop in order to change direction.
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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.
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Man absolutely cannot live by himself.
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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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People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love - or to be loved by - is difficult.
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We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
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We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
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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 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.
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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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A new question has arisen in modern man's mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living...No sensible answer can be given to the question...because the question does not make any sense.
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The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.
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To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
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Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of unaliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it.
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