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.
There will be books written about Harry. Every child in the world will know his name.
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
So much has been given me I have no time to ponder over that which has been denied.
Spiritual light rarely comes to those who merely sit in the darkness waiting for someone to flick the switch.
A man does not possess all the gifts, lest he think that grace is nature.
By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.
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