Words of Wisdom
~~ posted for collectivist ~~
“The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.”
“Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.”
“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”
“Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.”
“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.”
“Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”
“If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?”
“The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other.”
“In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”
“We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”
“Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness.”
“Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape.”
“What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.”
“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”
“If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.”
“Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”
“Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.”
“Society must be organized in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. 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.”
“The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.”
“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love.”
“Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.”
“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.”
“All men are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual.”
“To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow.”
“Men are born equal but they are also born different.”
“The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.”
“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.”
“The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society — and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic."
“Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.”
“Love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion.”
“That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
“Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.”
“There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.”
“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.”
“As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.”
“I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the “growth” of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence.”
“Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them. He would wander around open-mouthed in this heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were ever more and newer things to buy, and perhaps that his neighbors were just a little less privileged than he.”
“There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.”
“Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.”
Erich Seligmann Fromm (23 March 1900 – 18 March 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, s
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