Erich Fromm Quotes About Overcoming

Quotes about: Overcoming

• 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.

  Erich Fromm

  Practice, Discipline, Feelings

• 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.

  Erich Fromm

  Real, Love Is, Objectivity

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Art of Loving”, p.119, Open Road Media

• 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.

  Erich Fromm

  Giving Up, Mean, Self

• Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unite him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity.

  Erich Fromm

  Love, Wall, Integrity

  ERICH FROMM (1956). “THE ART OF LOVING”

• The deepest need of the human being is to overcome our
  separateness, to leave the prison of our loneliness.

  Erich Fromm

  Loneliness, Being Alone, Overcoming

• Greedhas no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.

  Erich Fromm

  Loneliness, Boredom, Greed

  Erich Fromm (2013). “To Have Or To Be?”, p.97, A&C Black

• 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.

  Erich Fromm

  Thinking, Punishment, Challenges

  Erich Fromm (2000). “The Art of Loving: The Centennial Edition”, p.115, A&C Black

• 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.

  Erich Fromm

  Real, Men, Ego

  Erich Fromm (1997). “On Being Human”, p.127, A&C Black

• Basically, there can only be two answers. One is to overcome separateness and find unity by regression to the state of unity which existed before awareness ever arose, that is, before man was born. The other answer is to be fully born, to develop one's awareness, one's reason, one's capacity to love to such a point that one transcends one's own egocentric involvement, and arrives at a new harmony, at a new oneness with the world.

  Erich Fromm

  Men, Capacity To Love, Two

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism”, p.21, Open Road Media

• Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

  Erich Fromm

  Self, Ideas, Feelings

  ERICH FROMM (1956). “THE ART OF LOVING”

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