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It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.

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
Begun
Tragedy
Dies
Death
Live

More quotes by Erich Fromm

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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.
Erich Fromm
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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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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.
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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Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
Erich Fromm
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What is for me socialism is exactly the opposite of a bureaucratically-managed culture.
Erich Fromm
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Man today being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little engergy time to devote himself to the true religious experience.
Erich Fromm
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The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself indeed, we should be fully born when we die.
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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To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
Erich Fromm
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I want to mention that Marx shares something, if you don't mind the comparison, with the Old Testament: many people talk about him, but nobody has read him.
Erich Fromm
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We substitute, or we rather hide, this fear of real intimacy by a superficial kind of friendliness, which is quite nice, but nevertheless, very shallow.
Erich Fromm
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I think our danger is that we talk one thing, and we feel and act another thing.
Erich Fromm
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The only concern which I have today is that we have a policy, a foreign policy, which enables us to avoid a catastrophe which, if one understands it properly, is indescribable.
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm
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The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
Erich Fromm
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You have to stop in order to change direction.
Erich Fromm
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We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams... we are also more inteligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake.
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm
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Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Erich Fromm