What is generally understood by mental health is negative, rather than positive: the absence of sickness, rather than the presence of well-being. (…) I would describe well-being as the ability to be creative, to be aware, and to respond; to be independent and fully active, and by this very fact to be one with the world. To be concerned with being, not with having; to experience joy in the very act of living, and to consider living creatively as the only meaning of life. Well-being is not an assumption in the mind of a person. It is expressed in his whole body, in the way he walks, talks, in the tonus of his muscles. ― (1959b: Values, Psychology, and Human Existence, in: E. Fromm, On Disobedience and Other Essays, New York (The Seabury Press) 1981, p. 163.)
well-being
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