One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
To take the difficulties, setbacks and sorrows of life as a challenge to overcome makes us stronger, rather than unjust punishment which should not happen to us, requires faith and courage.
There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling – it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.
The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.
I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity.
Authority is not a quality one person ‘has,’ in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.
To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge.
Modern man thinks he loses something – time – when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.
Human history begins with man’s act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason.
Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is.
Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.
Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.