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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.

-Erich Fromm

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The Sick Individual Finds

Erich Fromm

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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.

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Our Vitality, And The Vitality Of Each Nation, Rests On The Sincerity And Depth Of The Faith In The Ideas Which It Announces, Or Pronounces.

Human History Begins With Man's Act Of Disobedience Which Is At The Same Time The Beginning Of His Freedom And The Development Of His Reason.

Modern Man Lives Under The Illusion That He Knows What He Wants, While He Actually Wants What He Is Supposed To Want.

I Think We Got Off The Track, As Many Societies Do, Who Follow Successfully One Aim, And Yet Are Not Capable Of Seeing At What Point The Pursuit Of This Aim Prevents Them From Following A More Total Aim. That Is To Say, They Get Into A Blind Alley.

Creativity Is The Ability To See And To Respond.

Close Your Eyes, Let Your Spirit Start To Soar, And You'll Live As You've Never Lived Before.

We Have, In The Same Way, Relegated Our Own Responsibility In What Happens To Our Country To The Specialists, Who Are Supposed To Take Care Of It, And The Individual Citizen Does Not Feel That He Can Judge, And Even That He Should Judge, And Take Any Responsibility. I Think There Are Quite A Number Of Recent Developments Which Show That.

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.

I Believe That One Can And Must Hope For A Sane Society That Furthers Man's Capacity To Love His Fellow Men, To Work And Create, To Develop His Reason And His Objectivity Of A Sense Of Himself That Is Based On The Experience Of His Productive Energy. I Believe That One Can And Must Hope For The Collective Regaining Of A Mental Health That Is Characterized By The Capacity To Love And To Create.

Man Today Being Concerned With Production And Consumption As Ends In Themselves, Has Very Little Engergy Time To Devote Himself To The True Religious Experience.

I Believe That The Unity Of Man As Opposed To Other Living Things Derives From The Fact That Man Is The Conscious Life Of Himself. Man Is Conscious Of Himself, Of His Future, Which Is Death, Of His Smallness, Of His Impotence; He Is Aware Of Others As Others; Man Is In Nature, Subject To Its Laws Even If He Transcends It With His Thought.

In His Condemnation [karl] Marx Referred To Institutionalized Religion,that Has Precisely The Function Of Anesthetizing Men Till They Do Not Notice The In- Justice Of Which They Are The Perpetrators And The Victims.

All Great Art Is By Its Very Essence In Conflict With The Society With Which It Exists. It Expresses The Truth About The Existence Regardless Of Whether This Truth Serves Or Hinders The Survival Purpose Of A Given Society. All Great Art Is Revolutionary Because It Touches Upon The Reality Of Man And Questions The Reality Of The Various Transitory Forms Of Human Society.

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.

Like The Effect Of Advertising Upon The Customer, The Methods Of Political Propaganda Tend To Increase The Feeling Of Insignificance Of The Individual Voter.

Ger-mans Love The Ambiguous Word, Verbal Assonances As Ends In Themselves,vague Concepts. Anglosaxons Are More Clear.

The Person Who Gives Up His Individual Self And Becomes An Automaton, Identical With Millions Of Other Automatons Around Him, Need Not Feel Alone And Anxious Any More. But The Price He Pays, However, Is High; It Is The Loss Of His Self.

While We Teach Knowledge, We Are Losing That Teaching Which Is The Most Important One For Human Development: The Teaching Which Can Only Be Given By The Simple Presence Of A Mature, Loving Person.

To Die Is Poignantly Bitter, But The Idea Of Having To Die Without Having Lived Is Unbearable.

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.

Love Is The Child Of Freedom, Never That Of Domination.

Man, The More He Gains Freedom In The Sense Of Emerging From The Original Oneness With Man And Nature And The More He Becomes An "individual," Has No Choice But To Unite Himself With The World In The Spontaneity Of Love And Productive Work Or Else To Seek A Kind Of Security By Such Ties With The World As Destroy His Freedom And The Integrity Of His Individual Self.

You Have To Stop To Change Direction.

What Is It That Distinguishes Man From Animals? It Is Not His Upright Posture.

Man Is The Only Animal That Can Be Bored.

In The First World War British Propaganda Had To Invent The Stories Of German Soldiers Bayoneting Belgian Babies, Because There Were Too Few Real Atrocities To Feed The Hatred Against The Enemy.

To Live Is To Be Born Every Minute. Death Occurs When Birth Stops.

Knowing Who You Are

The Experience Of Separateness Arouses Anxiety; It Is, Indeed, The Source Of All Anxiety.

Nonviolent Communication

The State Of Sleep Is A State Of Freedom In Which Man Is Not Occupied With The Manipulation Of The Outside World.

What We Have In Common Is A Mass Men, A Mass Bureaucracy, And A Manipulation Of Everyone To Act Smoothly, But With The Illusion That He Follows His Own Decisions And Opinions.

I Am A Socialist. However, I Have To Add That What I Understand By Socialism Is Exactly The Opposite Of What Many People, Or Most People, Today Mean By Socialism.

An Illusion Shared By Everyone Becomes A Reality.

One Cannot Fall In Love, Really; One Has To Be In Love.

Falling In Love

There Is Perhaps No Phenomenon Which Contains So Much Destructive Feeling As Moral Indignation, Which Permits Envy Or To Be Acted Out Under The Guise Of Virtue.

Man Can Be Conditioned To Behave In Almost Every Desired Way; But Only "almost.

I Only Wish To Be The Fountain Of Love From Which You Drink, Every Drop Promising Eternal Passion.

When Blended With Sexuality, The Death Instinct Is Transformed Into More Harmless Impulses Expressed In Sadism Or Masochism.

The Criterion Of Mental Health Is Not One Of Individual Adjustment To A Given Social Order, But A Universal One, Valid For All Men, Of Giving A Satisfactory Answer To The Problem Of Human Existence.

We Try To Evade The Question Of Existence With Property, Prestige, Power, Possession, Production, Fun, And, Ultimately, By Trying To Forget That We- That I- Exist. No Matter How Much He Thinks Of God Or Goes To Church, Or How Much He Believes In Religious Ideas , If He, The Whole Man, Is Deaf To The Question Of Existence, If He Does Not Have An Answer To It, He Is Marking Time, And He Lives And Dies Like One Of The Million Things He Produces. He Thinks Of God, Instead Of Experiencing God.

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Man Absolutely Cannot Live By Himself.

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Paradoxically, The Ability To Be Alone Is The Condition For The Ability To Love.

Ability To Love

The Ownership Of Industry By The State - That Is Not Socialism.

Modern Man's Happiness Consists In The Thrill Of Looking At The Shop Windows, And In Buying All That He Can Afford To Buy, Either For Cash Or On Installments.

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Sanity Is Only That Which Is Within The Frame Of Reference Of Conventional Thought.

Frame Of Reference

There Is No Meaning To Life Except The Meaning Man Gives His Life By The Unfolding Of His Powers.

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Having Lost Religious Faith And The Humanistic Values Bound Up With It, He [man] Concentrated On Technical And Material Values And Lost The Capacity For Deep Emotional Experiences, For The Joy And Sadness That Accompany Them.

Love Means To Commit Oneself Without Guarantee, To Give Oneself Completely In The Hope That Our Love Will Produce Love In The Loved Person. Love Is An Act Of Faith, And Whoever Is Of Little Faith Is Also Of Little Love.

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.

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.

While Every Human Being Has A Capacity For Love, Its Realization Is One Of The Most Difficult Achievements.

If You Want A Big Brother, You Get All That Comes With It.

Well-being Is Possible To The Degree To Which One Has Overcome One's Narcissism; To The Degree To Which One Is Open, Responsive, Sensitive, Awake, Empty.... Well-being Means, Finally, To Drop One's Ego, To Give Up Greed, To Cease Chasing After Preservation And The Aggrandizement Of The Ego, To Be And To Experience One's Self In The Act Of Being, Not In Having, Preserving, Coveting, Using.

Mother's Love Is Peace. It Need Not Be Acquired, It Need Not Be Deserved.

The Real Opposition Is That Between The Ego-bound Man, Whose Existence Is Structured By The Principle Of Having, And The Free Man, Who Has Overcome His Egocentricity.

. . . Freedom To Creat And Construct, To Wonder And To Venture. Such Freedom Requires That The Individual Be Active And Responsible, Not A Slave Or A Well-fed Cog In The Machine . . . It Is Not Enough That Men Are Not Slaves; If Social Conditions Further The Existence Of Automatons, The Result Will Not Be Love Of Life, But Love Of Death.

Ideas Become Powerful Only If They Appear In The Flesh; An Idea Which Does Not Lead To Action By The Individual And By Groups Remains At Best A Paragraph Or A Footnote In A Book.

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

The Average American Is Not Concerned With His Society. He Talks About It, But You Know If One Speaks Of Being Concerned, I Mean Something About Which One Loses One's Sleep, Sometimes.

Love Is An Act Of Faith, And Whoever Is Of Little Faith Is Also Of Little Love.

We Are All Equal In The Sense That No Man Must Mean - Must Be - The Means For The Purposes Of Another Man; But Each Individual Is An End In Itself.

Respect Is Not Fear And Awe; It...[is]the Ability To See A Person As He Is, To Be Aware Of His Unique Individuality. Respect, Thus, Implies The Absence Of Exploitation. I Want The Loved Person To Grow And Unfold For His Own Sake, And In His Own Ways, And Not For The Purpose Of Serving Me.

That Millions Of People Share The Same Forms Of Mental Pathology Does Not Make These People Sane.

Care And Responsibility Are Constituent Elements Of Love, But Without Respect For And Knowledge Of The Beloved Person, Love Deteriorates Into Domination And Possessiveness.

To Take The Difficulties, Setbacks And Sorrows Of Life As A Challenge To Overcome Makes Us Stronger, Rather Than Unjust Punishment Which Should Not Happen To Us, Requires Faith And Courage.

If The Handbag Could Think, It Would Have A Terrific Inferiority Feeling, Because, Not Having Been Bought, It Would Feel Useless.

I Think Our Danger Is That We Talk One Thing, And We Feel And Act Another Thing.

The Manual Worker Does Not Have To Sell His Personality. He Doesn't Have To Sell His Smile.

[carl Gustav] Jung Was Not Right When He Said That The Unconscious Message Is Always Written Clearly And So There Is No Need To Seek To Discover The Distortions, Because One Must Recognize That Many Dreams Are More Or Less Distortions.

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.

Erotic Love Begins With Separateness, And Ends In Oneness. Motherly Love Begins With Oneness, And Leads To Separateness.

I Think The Russians Might Do Away With The Terror In Twenty Or Thirty Or Years, When They Are Richer, And When They Don't Need These Repressive Methods So Much.

Man's Main Task In Life Is To Give Birth To Himself.

I Would Say, Compared With The 19th Century, Compared With Most Previous History, This Is As Good Or Better A Society Than Any Which Man Has Ever Made. But That Doesn't Mean It Is Such A Good One.

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.

We Can Express Ideas Without Being Afraid Of Being Killed Or Imprisoned.

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.

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.

Education Is Identical With Helping The Child Realize His Potentialities. The Opposite Of Education Is Manipulation, Which Is Based On The Absence Of Faith In The Growth Of Potentialities And The Connection That A Child Will Be Right Only If The Adults Put Into Him What Is Desirable And Suppress What Seems To Be Undesirable.

In The Sleeping State, Instead, One Is Much More Oneself, Even If Society Never Ceases To Intervene.

[sigmund ] Freud Did Not Under-stand That The Dream Is A Highly Creative Act, Written In The Universal Language Of Symbolism, And Only Secondarily Does Censorship Distort Those Parts That The Subject Refuses To Accept Even In Sleep.

We Live In A World Of Things, And Our Only Connection With Them Is That We Know How To Manipulate Or To Consume Them.

There Are Many Who Feel Consciously Hopeful And Unconsciously Hopeless, And There Are Few For Whom It Is The Other Way Around.

We Are A Society Of Notoriously Unhappy People: Lonely, Anxious, Depressed, Destructive, Dependent - People Who Are Glad When We Have Killed The Time We Are Trying So Hard To Save.

Is Love An Art? Then It Requires Knowledge And Effort.

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.

We Are Not Only Less Reasonable And Less Decent In Our Dreams... We Are Also More Inteligent, Wiser And Capable Of Better Judgment When We Are Asleep Than When We Are Awake.

Man Can Never Stand Still. He Must Find Solutions To This Contradiction, And Ever Better Solutions To The Extent To Which Reality Enables Him.

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.

Actually, If You Take The Average American, And Studies Have Shown That, He Is Really Concerned Only With Private Affairs; That Is To Say, With His Health, His Money And Family Affairs.

Man Can Only Know The Nagation, Never The Position Of Ultimate Reality.

All Genuine Ideals Have One Thing In Common: They Express The Desire For Something Which Is Not Yet Accomplished But Which Is Desirable For The Purpose Of The Growth And Happiness Of The Individual.

The Ordinary Man With Extraordinary Power Is The Chief Danger For Mankind - Not The Fiend Or The Sadist.

Religion And Nationalism, As Well As Any Custom And Any Belief However Absurd And Degrading, If It Only Connects The Individual With Others, Are Refuges From What Man Most Dreads: Isolation.

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 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.

Falling In Love

The Paradoxical And Tragic Situation Of Man Is That His Conscience Is Weakest When He Needs It Most.

A Vast Sector Of Modern Advertising... Does Not Appeal To Reason But To Emotion; Like Any Other Kind Of Hypnoid Suggestion, It Tries To Impress Its Objects Emotionally And Then Make Them Submit Intellectually.

The Average American Has Separated His Private Life From His Existence As A Member Of His Society, And Leaves That To The Specialists In The Government To Take Care Of.

Productive Work, Love And Thought Are Possible Only If A Person Can Be, When Necessary, Quiet And Alone. To Be Able To Listen To Oneself Is The Necessary Condition For Relating Oneself To Others.

Productive Work

The Activity At This Very Moment Must Be The Only Thing That Matters, To Which One Is Fully Given. If One Is Concentrated, It Matters Little What One Is Doing. The Important, As Well As The Unimportant Things, Assume A New Dimension Of Reality, Because They Have One's Full Attention.

Unimportant Things

Fortitude Is The Capacity To Say No When The World Wants To Hear 'yes'

Love Is The Only Sane And Satisfactory Answer To The Problem Of Human Existence.

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.

The Customer Is An Object To Be Manipulated, Not A Concrete Person Whose Aims The Businessman Is Interested To Satisfy.

Power On The One Side, Fear On The Other, Are Always The Buttresses On Which Irrational Authority Is Built.

A Society Whose Principles Are Acquisition, Profit, And Property Produces A Social Character Oriented Around Having, And Once The Dominant Pattern Is Established, Nobody Wants To Be An Outsider, Or Indeed An Outcast; In Order To Avoid This Risk Everybody Adapts To The Majority, Who Have In Common Only Their Mutual Antagonism.

It Is True That One Has To Think First And Then To Act - But It's Also True That If One Has No Possibility Of Acting, One's Thinking Kind Of Becomes Empty And Stupid.

The Successful Revolutionary Is A Statesman, The Unsuccessful One A Criminal.

In Fifty Years Activity As An Analyst I Have Witnessed Again And Again That A Dreamer After Having Met A Personage Regarded By All As Influential And Good,saw Him Again In A Dream With A Different Face.

Different Faces

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 Knowledge

Love Is A Decision, It Is A Judgment, It Is A Promise. If Love Were Only A Feeling, There Would Be No Basis For The Promise To Love Each Other Forever. A Feeling Comes And It May Go. How Can I Judge That It Will Stay Forever, When My Act Does Not Involve Judgment And Decision.

Man Unites Himself With The World In The Process Of Creation.

If You Take A Salesman, Who Sells A Useless Commodity, He Feels Like A Fraud.

It Takes A Moment To Tell Someone You Love Them, But It Takes A Lifetime To Prove It.

Optimism Is An Alienated Form Of Faith, Pessimism An Alienated Form Of Despair.

In Times Of Change, Learners Inherit The Earth

Times Have Changed

The Mother-child Relationship Is Paradoxical And, In A Sense, Tragic. It Requires The Most Intense Love On The Mother's Side, Yet This Very Love Must Help The Child Grow Away From The Mother, And To Become Fully Independent.

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.

Neurosis Can Be Understood Best As The Battle Between Tendencies Within An Individual; Deep Character Analysis Leads, If Successful, To The Progressive Solution.

Chronic Boredom Compensated Or Uncompensated Constitutes One Of The Major Psychopathological Phenomena In Contemporary Technotronic Society, Although It Is Only Recently That It Has Found Some Recognition.

The Capacity To Be Puzzled Is The Premise Of All Creation, Be It In Art Or In Science.

The Most Important Factor For The Development Of The Individual Is The Structure And The Values Of The Society Into Which He Was Born.

In Fact, There Are Very Important Writings Of Marx Which Are Not Even Translated Into English.

Men Are Born Equal But They Are Also Born Different.

We Have Faith In The Potentialities Of Others, Of Ourselves, And Of Mankind Because, And Only To The Degree To Which, We Have Experienced The Growth Of Our Own Potentialities, The Reality Of Growth In Ourselves, The Strength Of Our Own Power Of Reason And Love.

Exclusive Love Is A Contradiction In Itself.

The Affirmation Of One's Own Life, Happiness, Growth And Freedom, Is Rooted In One's Capacity To Love.

Capacity To Love

The Individual Citizen Has Very Little Possibility Of Having Any Influence - Of Making His Opinion Felt In The Decision-making.

Man's Main Task In Life Is To Give Birth To Himself, To Become What He Potentially Is. The Most Important Product Of His Effort Is His Own Personality.

The Lust For Power Is Not Rooted In Strength But In Weakness.

It Seems That Great Minds A Hundred Years Ago Saw What Would Happen Today Or Tomorrow, While We To Whom It Is Happening Blind Ourselves In Order Not To Be Disturbed In Our Daily Routine.

Boredom Is Nothing But The Experience Of A Paralysis Of Our Productive Powers And The Sense Of Unaliveness. Among The Evils Of Life, There Are Few Which Are As Painful As Boredom, And Consequently Every Attempt Is Made To Avoid It.

What Is For Me Socialism Is Exactly The Opposite Of A Bureaucratically-managed Culture.

Our Conscious Motivations, Ideas, And Beliefs Are A Blend Of False Information, Biases, Irrational Passions, Rationalizations, Prejudices, In Which Morsels Of Truth Swim Around And Give The Reassurance Albeit False, That The Whole Mixture Is Real And True. The Thinking Processes Attempt To Organize This Whole Cesspool Of Illusions According To The Laws Of Plausibility. This Level Of Consciousness Is Supposed To Reflect Reality; It Is The Map We Use For Organizing Our Life.

The Only Truly Affluent Are Those Who Do Not Want More Than They Have.

For The Most Part, Biophiliacs,lovers Of Life, Are Found Among Simple People, Without Pretensions.

The Most Important Things We Talk About On Sundays Are Things To Which We Pay Very Little Attention.

Hate Is A Product Of The Unfulfilled Life.

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.

For [karl] Marx What Counts Is Man. He Is The Root Of Everything;while For Capitalism, The Aim Are Things, Profit, And Man Is Only A Means To Gain Them. As An Authentically Religious Individual, Marx Could Not Be Other Than Against "religion".

[sigmund ] Freud Assumes That Every Dream Represents The Satisfaction Of Adesire And In The Last Analysis, Of A Sexual Desire That Has Its Roots In Infancy.

We Are Concerned With Things. We Are Concerned With Success. We Are Concerned With Money. We Are Concerned With Instrumentalities.

Creativity Requires The Courage To Let Go Of Certainties.

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.

A Dream Is A Microscope Through Which We Look At The Hidden Occurrences In Our Soul.

Modern Man Thinks He Loses Something - Time - When He Does Not Do Things Quickly. Yet He Does Not Know What To Do With The Time He Gains, Except Kill It.

Only When Man Succeeds In Developing His Reason And Love Further Than He Has Done So Far, Only When He Can Build A World Based On Human Solidarity And Justice, Only When He Can Feel Rooted In The Experience Of Universal Brotherliness, Will He Have Tr

The Only Concern Which I Have Today Is That We Have A Policy, A Foreign Policy, Which Enables Us To Avoid A Catastrophe; Which, If One Understands It Properly, Is Indescribable.

In Erotic Love, Two People Who Were Separate Become One. In Motherly Love, Two People Who Were One Become Separate. The Mother Must Not Only Tolerate, She Must Wish And Support The Child's Separation.

The Destruction Of The World Is The Last, Almost Desperate Attempt To Save Myself From Being Crushed By It

There Is Only One Meaning Of Life: The Act Of Living Itself.

Meaning Of Life

Most People See The Problem Of Love Primarily As That Of Being Loved, Rather Than That Of Loving, Of One's Capacity To Love. Hence The Problem To Them Is How To Be Loved, How To Be Lovable.

Capacity To Love

The Kind Of Relatedness To The World May Be Noble Or Trivial, But Even Being Related To The Basest Kind Of Pattern Is Immensely Preferable To Being Alone.

The Scars Left From The Child's Defeat In The Fight Against Irrational Authority Are To Be Found At The Bottom Of Every Neurosis.

I Feel Worried, Deeply Worried, Only About One Thing - The Possibility That We Fall... That We Cannot Avoid An Atomic War.

Man May Be Defined As The Animal That Can Say ''i,'' That Can Be Aware Of Himself As A Separate Entity.

Can One Have Love? If We Could, Love Would Need To Be A Thing, A Substance That One Can Have, Own, Possess. The Truth Is, There Is No Such Thing As Love. Love Is An Abstraction, Perhaps A Goddess Or An Alien Being, Although Nobody Has Ever Seen This Goddess. In Reality, There Exists Only The Act Of Loving. To Love Is A Productive Activity. It Implies Caring For, Knowing, Responding, Affirming, Enjoying: The Person, The Tree, The Painting, The Idea. It Means Bringing To Life, Increasing His/her/its Aliveness. It Is A Process, Self-renewing And Self Increasing.

Only The Person Who Has Faith In Himself Is Able To Be Faithful To Others.

Love Is A Power Which Produces Love.

The Pace Of Science Forces The Pace Of Technique. Theoretical Physics Forces Atomic Energy On Us; The Successful Production Of The Fission Bomb Forces Upon Us The Manufacture Of The Hydrogen Bomb. We Do Not Choose Our Problems, We Do Not Choose Our Products; We Are Pushed, We Are Forced -- By What? By A System Which Has No Purpose And Goal Transcending It, And Which Makes Man Its Appendix.

I Think If You Ask What People Really Mean By Happiness Today, It Is The Experience Of Unlimited Consumption - The Kind Of Thing Mr. Huxley Described In "brave New World."

Brave New World

One Cannot Be Deeply Responsive To The World Without Being Saddened Very Often.

The Whole Life Of The Individual Is Nothing But The Process Of Giving Birth To Himself; Indeed, We Should Be Fully Born When We Die.

I Believe That The Experience Of Love Is The Most Human And Humanizing Act That It Is Given To Man To Enjoy And That It, Like Reason, Makes No Sense If Conceived In A Partial Way.

In The Act Of Giving Lies The Expression Of My Aliveness.

To Be Concentrated Means To Live Fully In The Present.

I Am Convinced That Boredom Is One Of The Greatest Tortures. If I Were To Imagine Hell, It Would Be The Place Where You Were Continually Bored.

It Is Notorious That No War Between Countries Elicits As Much Hate And Cruelty As Civil War, In Which There Is No Lack Of Acquaintance Between The Two Warring Sides.

Love Isn't Something Natural. Rather It Requires Discipline, Concentration, Patience, Faith, And The Overcoming Of Narcissism. It Isn't A Feeling, It Is A Practice.

Equality Today Means ‘sameness’, Rather Than ‘oneness’.

The Task We Must Set For Ourselves Is Not To Feel Secure, But To Be Able To Tolerate Insecurity.

Modern Man Is Alienated From Himself, From His Fellow Men, And From Nature. He Has Been Transformed Into A Commodity, Experiences His Life Forces As An Investment Which Must Bring Him The Maximum Profit Obtainable Under Existing Market Conditions.

To Be Loved Because Of One's Merit, Because One Deserves It, Always Leaves Doubt; Maybe I Did Not Please The Person Whom I Want To Love Me, Maybe This, Or That - There Is Always A Fear That Love Could Disappear.

Destructiveness Is The Outcome Of An Unlived Life.

Destructiveness

The Pleasure In Complete Domination Over Another Person (or Other Animate Creature) Is The Very Essence Of The Sadistic Drive. Another Way Of Formulating The Same Thought Is To Say That The Aim Of Sadism Is To Transform Man Into A Thing, Something Animate Into Something Inanimate, Since By Complete And Absolute Control The Living Loses One Essential Quality Of Life - Freedom.

We Are Confronted With The Possibility Of A War Of Such Destruction That The Whole Existence Of Our Nation And Of The Whole World Is At Stake. And Yet, People Know It - People Read It In The Newspapers, People Read That At The First Attack, A Hundred Million Americans Might Be Killed. And Yet, They Talk About It As If They Were Talking About Something Being Wrong With The Carburetor Of Their Car, Perhaps.

That Is Not Quite Enough To Make One Happy, If One Spends Eight Hours A Day In Something Which In Itself Has No Meaning And Interest, Except That One Gains Money From It.

The Spirit Of A Production-centered, Commodity-greedy Society Is Such That Only The Non-conformist Can Defend Himself Sufficiently Against It. Those Who Are Seriously Concerned With Love As The Only Rational Answer To The Problem Of Human Existence Must, Then, Arrive At The Conclusion That Important And Radical Changes In Our Social Structure Are Necessary, If Love Is To Become A Social And Not A Highly Individualistic, Marginal Phenomenon.

In Our Enthusiasm To Dominate Nature And To Produce More Material Good - Goods - We Have Transformed Means Into Ends.

Today It Is Not Alive. What, Then, Is This Experience Of Humanism? With The Above Survey I Have Tried To Show You That The Experience Of Humanism Is That — As Terence Expressed It — “nothing Human Is Alien To Me”; That Nothing Which Exists In Any Human Being Does Not Exist In Myself. I Am The Criminal And I Am The Saint. I Am The Child And I Am The Adult. I Am The Man Who Lived A Hundred Thousand Years Ago And I Am The Man Who, Provided We Don't Destroy The Human Race, Will Live Hundred Thousand Years From Now.

Optimism Is An Alienated Form Of Faith, Pessimism An Alienated Form Of Despair. If One Truly Responds To Man And His Future, Ie , Concernedly And "responsibly." One Can Respond Only By Faith Or By Despair. Rational Faith As Well As Rational Despair Are Based On The Most Thorough, Critical Knowledge Of All The Factors That Are Relevant For The Survival Of Man.

Free Man Is By Necessity Insecure, Thinking Man By Necessity Uncertain.

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. Love Is A Productive Orientation For Which It Is Essential That There Be Present At The Same Time: Concern, Responsibility, And Respect For And Knowledge Of The Object Of The Union.

[sigmund Freud] Makes The Interpretation Of Dreams Extremely Simple: It Deals In Substance With Discovering What Unconscious Desires, Distorted But Recognizable, Are Hid-den In The Dream. Instead, For Me The Dream Is A Mixture Of Thoughts And Sensations That Man Has When He Is Asleep, A Mental State Relatively Protected From The Constant Noise That Society Makes.

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