The Wisdom Letter #054
5 quotes from Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
✹ For today's Wisdom Letter, we have carefully curated five bite-sized quotes from the German social psychologist and psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm (1900–1980).
Quote № 01:
“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
— Erich Fromm, “The Sane Society”
Quote № 02:
“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.”
— Erich Fromm, “The Sane Society”
Quote № 03:
“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.”
— Erich Fromm, “The Art of Loving”
Quote № 04:
“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.”
— Erich Fromm, “The Art of Loving”
Quote № 05:
“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.”
— Erich Fromm, “Credo”
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✺ Today’s Questions
Three philosophical questions to foster your curiosity:
Question № 01:
Is there inherent value in preserving one's sanity, even if it means turning a blind eye to societal injustices or absurdities?
Question № 02:
How do we discern between objective truth and subjective truth in a world inundated with diverse viewpoints and interpretations?
Question № 03:
What fundamental qualities or characteristics distinguish humans from other animals, if any?
✽ Thank you for reading today’s Wisdom Letter.
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I wonder if the only essential difference between Homo sapiens and other life forms is that some human societies promote the idea that we are uniquely different, and thus uniquely special. Once this is accepted without question, the conceit that we are separate from nature follows, resulting in an ever-growing cascade of insanities.
Thanks again for sharing his wisdom. As an apprecitor of Fromm you have prompted me to deeper reflection this morning and with thanks to the attached questions.