The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that true fulfillment in life involves a deep self-discovery, yet many people fail to achieve this before their time ends.
Erich Fromm's quote expresses the idea that the ultimate goal of existence is to reach a state of authentic self-awareness and realization, termed 'being fully born.' However, it reflects a tragic reality wherein many individuals go through life without this profound awakening, remaining disconnected from their true selves and potential until it's too late. In this way, Fromm highlights the existential struggle of human life, emphasizing the importance of self-exploration and the risks of unfulfilled potential.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth, this quote can be used to inspire people to pursue their true selves.
Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict; joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are only one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves.
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.
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.
To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern β and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.
In times of change, learners inherit the earth
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he trouble his head whether the mice on board are at their ease or not?
It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.
Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?
At the end of the table, the secretary was reading the decision in some case, but in such a mournful and monotonous voice, that the condemned man himself would have fallen asleep while listening to it. The judge, no doubt, would have been the first of all to do so, had he not entered into an engrossing conversation while it was going on.
It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.
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