Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one’s own wishes with existing reality.
The more man understands and masters nature the less he needs to use religion as a scientific explanation and as a magical device for controlling nature.
The fact that millions of people take part in a delusion doesn’t make it sane.
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.
Love is an act of faith.
Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.
The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.
The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.
True love is like a pair of socks: you gotta have two and they’ve gotta match.
It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
The scars left from the child’s defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.
There is undoubtedly a difference between people who manipulate other people and people who create things.
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.
Man can only know the nagation, never the position of ultimate reality.
The affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one’s capacity to love.
There is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves. And there is nothing which brings us greater joy and happiness than to think, feel, and say what is ours.
Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.
Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.