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

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Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
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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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Education is helping the child realise his potentialities.
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Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
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Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.
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We are terribly imaginative, as far as technique in science is concerned. As far as changes in social arrangements are concerned, we lack utterly in imagination.
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Freedom does not mean license.
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We talk a great deal about Russia today, and I'm afraid that in twenty years, we and Russia will be more similar than different.
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The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.
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There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.
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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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Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
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The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love.
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Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the same time the beginning of his freedom and the development of his reason.
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Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.
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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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