Erich Fromm
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.Collection: Passion
If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.Collection: Fear
We talk about equality, about happiness, about freedom - and about the spiritual values of religion, and about God - and in our daily life, we act on principles which are different, and partly contradictory.Collection: Spiritual
Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.Collection: Reality
Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.Collection: Men
That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature. 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.Collection: Life
If the handbag could think, it would have a terrific inferiority feeling, because, not having been bought, it would feel useless.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Men
Man today is fascinated by the possibility of buying, more, better, and especially, new things. He is consumption hungry... To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite secondary. Modern man, if the dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world.Collection: Dream
The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.Collection: Stronger
When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.Collection: Sadism
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Love is not a spontaneous feeling, a thing that you fall into, but is something that requires thought, knowledge, care, giving, and respect. And it is something that is rare and difficult to find in capitalism, which commodifies human activity.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Believe
For [Sigmund ] Freud, the manifest dream, that is that which we remember after waking,is like a code message, that can be interpreted, provided the right key is avail-able, for example the method of free association.Collection: Dream
The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial experience of ‘falling’ in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of ‘standing’ in love.Collection: Falling In Love
What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.Collection: Men
There are many who feel consciously hopeful and unconsciously hopeless, and there are few for whom it is the other way around.Collection: Hopeful
Love is hot a higher power which descends upon mn nor a duty which is imposed upon him; it is his own power by which he relates himself to the world and makes it truly his.Collection: Inspirational
If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself, too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.Collection: Able
Beyond the element of giving, the active characteristic of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsability, respect and knowledgeCollection: Giving
I have a tremendous faith in the possibilities of man, which have shown in his past, and I believe if we avoid war, we shall be able to revive our real vision of life, but that we must see it, and therefore, that we must be critical to where we are.Collection: Real
Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.Collection: Tyrants
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.Collection: Years
If one admits that the influence of the outside world is essentially beneficial, the lack of such influence during sleep would tend to diminish the value of our dream activity so as to render it inferior to the mental activity that takes place when we are awake, when we are exposed to these beneficial influences of surrounding reality. But how can one say that the influence of reality is exclusively beneficial. Could it not also be damaging, and could its absence not give access to qualities superior to those that we have when awake?Collection: Dream
I would consider a socialism a mixture of the minimum of centralization necessary for a modern industrial state, and a maximum of decentralization.Collection: Mixtures
The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most.Collection: Men
It is essential... that discipline should not be practised like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one's own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behaviour which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practising it.Collection: Expression
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.Collection: Character
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling – it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Country