"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."

Rating:

  rate this quote
Topic: none  help us select a topic for this quote

More quotes from: Erich Fromm

• "A vast sector of modern advertising... does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like ..."
• "As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask. "
• "Authority is not a quality one person "has," in the sense that he has property ..."
• "Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to ..."
• "Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. "
• "If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his ..."
• "If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then ..."
• "Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need ..."
• "In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two. "
• "In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation. "
• "In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century ..."
• "Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with ..."
• "Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires ..."
• "Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. "
• "Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the ..."
• "Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he ..."
• "Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he ..."
• "Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one ..."
• "Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much. "
• "One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. "
• "Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought. "

• "The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art ..."
• "The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future ..."
• "The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being ..."
• "The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense ..."
• "The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have. "
• "The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the ..."
• "The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to ..."
• "The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal. "
• "The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be ..."
• "There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail. "
• "There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes ..."
• "There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the ..."
• "There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself. "
• "There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which ..."
• "To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived ..."
• "To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet ..."
• "We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing ..."
• "We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that ..."
• "What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between ..."
• "Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or ..."

• "Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the ..."