Hallie W

“An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and "belonging." On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances present.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length, we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty...Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“Man does not suffer so much from poverty today, as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton. That his life has become empty and lost its meaning.

The victory over all kinds of authoritarian systems will be possible only if democracy does not retreat, but takes the offensive and proceeds to realise what has been its aim in the minds of those who fought for freedom throughout the last centuries.

It will triumph over the forces of nihilism only if it can imbue people with a faith that is the strongest the human mind is capable of - the faith in life and in truth and in freedom, as the active and spontaneous realisation of the individual self.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love