"Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate."
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Erich Fromm quotes (page 16 of 22)
426 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Man is the only animal who does not feel at home in nature, who can feel evicted from paradise, the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem that he has to solve and from which he cannot escape. He cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with nature, and he does not know where he will arrive if he goes forward. Man's existential contradiction results in a state of constant disequilibrium. This disequilibrium distinguishes him from the animal, which lives, as it were, in harmony with nature."
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"Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves."
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"When an individual is awake, almost all he does and says is inspired by the model of behavior that the society imposes,even without his being aware of it."
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"We have a religious renaissance today in America, as many people say. I would say this religious renaissance, ninety percent of it is the greatest danger true religious experience has ever been confronted with."
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"Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves."
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"Once they are through the process of education, most people lose the capacity of wondering, of being surprised. They feel they ought to know everything, and hence that it is a sign of ignorance to be surprised or puzzled by anything."
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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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"Politics and religious leaders [are hindered] by their egotism."
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"Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness."
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"I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism."
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"I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself."
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"Love is a power which produces love."
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"Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts."
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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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"We are concerned with things. We are concerned with success. We are concerned with money. We are concerned with instrumentalities."
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"The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula "I am we"; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an "individual," existing apart from his group."
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"It doesn't matter whether one uses God or doesn't. What matters is which experience a person has."
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"According to me [Sigmund ] Freud did not notice that the dream expresses the inner experiences in a symbolic form,resembling in that, poetry or other art forms."
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"I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between "life" and "death"; between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission."
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