#Quote
More Quotes by Erich Fromm
Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love
If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being 'asocial' or 'irrational' in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.
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.
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
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
We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
