Quote

Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality - or as one says sometimes, our personality package - for something.

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
Things
Main
Like
Market
Personality
Says
Relating
Others
Package
Sometimes
Packages
Something
Exchange
Way
Relate

More quotes by Erich Fromm

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Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
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I understand by socialism a society in which the aim of production is not profit, but the use. In which the individual citizen participates responsibly in his work, and in the whole social organization, and in which he is not a means who is employed by capital.
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The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
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Loving becomes, and the ability to love, becomes one of the most important things in life.
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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.
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If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of 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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Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
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There is only one reality: the act of feeling ourselves in the process of making choices.
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We all dream we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.
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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.
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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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In times of change, learners inherit the earth
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It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
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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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It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.
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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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A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.
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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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In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue.
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