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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.

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
Social
Sanity
Given
Mental
Order
Universal
Problem
Answer
Criterion
Human
Health
Satisfactory
Humans
Answers
Valid
Giving
Existence
Adjustment
Men
Individual
Criteria

More quotes by Erich Fromm

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Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.
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There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
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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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Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
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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.
Erich Fromm
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Man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way but only almost.
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Love is a power which produces love.
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I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence he is aware of others as others man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought.
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.
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In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
Erich Fromm
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Man always dies before he is fully born.
Erich Fromm
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. . . freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.
Erich Fromm
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There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
Erich Fromm
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This Marxian sentence, repeated to the point of boredom, is misinterpreted. In reality [Karl] Marx was a religious man.
Erich Fromm
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I would say our social relationships are relatively shallow. We are actually afraid to be intimate, with people - many people even with their wives and husbands.
Erich Fromm
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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.
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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If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
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The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.
Erich Fromm
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[Sigmund ] Freud did not under-stand that the dream is a highly creative act, written in the universal language of symbolism, and only secondarily does censorship distort those parts that the subject refuses to accept even in sleep.
Erich Fromm