The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it.
Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.
Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.
In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue.
The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.
Love is the productive form of relatedness to others and to oneself. It implies responsibility, care, respect. If it isn’t productive and respectful, it isn’t love, but only fear masquerading as love.
Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of unaliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it.
I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.
Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life.
In times of change, learners inherit the earth.
Happiness is a man’s greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside.
The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.
Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.
The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most.
I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion.
If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love.
The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.
Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have tr.
Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations.