"Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him."
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Quote collection
Erich Fromm quotes (page 9 of 22)
426 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity."
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"Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution."
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"Love is the child of freedom, never that of domination."
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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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"Society must be organized in such a way that mans social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it."
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"Men are born equal but they are also born different."
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"Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness."
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"Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions."
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"There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers."
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"The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science."
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"Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint."
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"Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built."
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"The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own"
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"Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self."
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"I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity."
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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."
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"Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair."
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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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"Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man."
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