Integrity simply means not violating one's own identity.
Interpretation
Integrity involves staying true to your own values and beliefs.
In this quote, Erich Fromm emphasizes the importance of integrity as remaining consistent with one's identity and values. It suggests that true integrity is not just about honesty in interactions with others, but also about being authentic and true to oneself, ensuring that one's actions align with their core beliefs and principles.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about personal development.
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.
It's not that, living in Pakistan, I feel an enormous constraint on how I can write and what I can say; rather, I recognize that one has to navigate these things... Am I aware of things that one could say that would be risky or that could be dangerous? Certainly I'm aware of those things.
...That genius is a rare exception (:) It's not true. Talent and genius have been wasted on enormous scale throughout our history; this is all I know for sure.
You're not supposed to give people what they want, you're supposed to give them what they don't know that they want yet.
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
He who does not arrive at the Intuition of these Truths by means of Ecstasy knows only the name of Inspiration.
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