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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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Erich Fromm
Age: 79 †
Born: 1900
Born: March 23
Died: 1980
Died: March 18
Philosopher
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Expressed
Transformed
Sexuality
Impulse
Masochism
Instinct
Sadism
Death
Blended
Harmless
Impulses

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An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.
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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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Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.
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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.
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To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
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To be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this, or that - there is always a fear that love could disappear.
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Love is hot a higher power which descends upon mn nor a duty which is imposed upon him it is his own power by which he relates himself to the world and makes it truly his.
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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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Whether...a change from the supremacy of natural science to a new social science will take place...depends on one factor: how many brilliant, learned, disciplined, and caring men and women are attracted by the new challenge.
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This Marxian sentence, repeated to the point of boredom, is misinterpreted. In reality [Karl] Marx was a religious man.
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[Carl Gustav] Jung was not right when he said that the unconscious message is always written clearly and so there is no need to seek to discover the distortions, because one must recognize that many dreams are more or less distortions.
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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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Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.
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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We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree to which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and love.
Erich Fromm
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People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love , power , fame , revenge . Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent.
Erich Fromm
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Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience we forget what we knew in our dream.
Erich Fromm
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A vast sector of modern advertising... does not appeal to reason but to emotion like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.
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The criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one, valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
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Love is the only way of knowledge, which in the act of union answers my quest. In the act of loving, of giving myself, in the act of penetrating the other person, I find myself, I discover myself, I discover us both, I discover man.
Erich Fromm