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All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual.

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
Something
Ideals
Growth
Purpose
Common
Happiness
Desirable
Desire
Accomplished
Individual
Genuine
Thing
Express

More quotes by Erich Fromm

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Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.
Erich Fromm
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Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.
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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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I think our danger is that we talk one thing, and we feel and act another thing.
Erich Fromm
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In times of change, learners inherit the earth
Erich Fromm
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A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.
Erich Fromm
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Politics and religious leaders [are hindered] by their egotism.
Erich Fromm
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I would say love is something everybody talks about, and the need for love is one of the most basic needs of man, namely the experience of union with another being - of becoming one with another being.
Erich Fromm
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What is common to our societies is the development into a managed mass society, with big bureaucracy, managing people. The Russians do it by force. We do it by persuasion.
Erich Fromm
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Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm
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The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love.
Erich Fromm
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Man absolutely cannot live by himself.
Erich Fromm
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Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.
Erich Fromm
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The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.
Erich Fromm
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It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.
Erich Fromm
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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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When people can see a vision and simultaneously recognize what can be done step by step in a concrete way to achieve it, they will begin to feel encouragement and enthusiasm instead of fright.
Erich Fromm
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It is essential... that discipline should not be practised like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one's own will that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behaviour which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practising it.
Erich Fromm
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Love is an active power in man a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unite him with others love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity.
Erich Fromm
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Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity, in the many ways in which such violation is possible.
Erich Fromm