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The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person and him of great joy is the difference between get and give.

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
Giving
Essentials
Great
Difference
Type
Joy
Differences
Give
Neurotic
Persons
Unhappy
Person
Essential

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I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is, they would say, if they are honest, that it is a big department store, with new things every week - all the money to buy them, and maybe a little more than the neighbours.
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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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We talk about equality, about happiness, about freedom - and about the spiritual values of religion, and about God - and in our daily life, we act on principles which are different, and partly contradictory.
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We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
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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.
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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.
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To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.
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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.
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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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The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology.
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There is only one reality: the act of feeling ourselves in the process of making choices.
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Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.
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In the sleeping state, instead, one is much more oneself, even if society never ceases to intervene.
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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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In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.
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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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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.
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The average American has separated his private life from his existence as a member of his society, and leaves that to the specialists in the government to take care of.
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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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The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs.... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.
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