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I think we got off the track, as many societies do, who follow successfully one aim, and yet are not capable of seeing at what point the pursuit of this aim prevents them from following a more total aim. That is to say, they get into a blind alley.

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
Many
Pursuit
Think
Track
Alley
Thinking
Following
Alleys
Blind
Prevents
Follow
Successfully
Capable
Societies
Seeing
Aim
Point
Total

More quotes by Erich Fromm

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As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
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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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To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness
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I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.
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Man always dies before he is fully born.
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Loving becomes, and the ability to love, becomes one of the most important things in life.
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People do not see that the main question is not : Am I loved? which is to a large extent the question : Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired? The main question is: Can I 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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Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
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We are concerned with things. We are concerned with success. We are concerned with money. We are concerned with instrumentalities.
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To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.
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There is only one reality: the act of feeling ourselves in the process of making choices.
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The Russians have succeeded in one thing: they have sold the world the idea that they represent socialism and the ideas of Marx,and we have done the greatest service to their propaganda by agreeing that that's what it is.
Erich Fromm
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Love is the only way of knowledge, which in the act of union answers my quest. In the act of loving, of giving myself, in the act of penetrating the other person, I find myself, I discover myself, I discover us both, I discover man.
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.
Erich Fromm
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We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
Erich Fromm
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Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life
Erich Fromm
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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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The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.
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