To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death.
The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation – and creation is always a miracle – is outside of his range of emotional experience.
Man’s nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.
Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology.
In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.
We believe ourselves to be motivated by self-interest and yet our lives are devoted to aims which are not our own.
Hope is a decisive element in any attempt to bring about social change in the direction of greater aliveness, awareness, and reason.
First of all, the practice of an art requires discipline. I shall never be good at anything if I do not do it in a disciplined way; anything I do only if “I am in the mood” may be a nice or amusing hobby, but I shall never become a master in that art.
Man can only go forward by developing his reason, by finding a new harmony, a human one, instead of the prehuman harmony which is irretrievably lost. When.
If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, “I love you,” I must be able to say, “I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.
Greed and peace preclude each other.
He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid. The newly won freedom appears as a curse; he is free from the sweet bondage of paradise, but he is not free to govern himself, to realize his individuality.
Selfishness is not identical with self-love but with its very opposite. Selfishness is one kind of greediness. Like all greediness, it contains an insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
Real conflicts between two people, those which do not serve to cover up or to project, but which are experienced on the deep level of inner reality to which they belong, are not destructive. They lead to clarification, they produce a catharsis from which both persons emerge with more knowledge and more strength.
Only in the love of those who do not serve a purpose, love begins to unfold.
For despite what some people say, love is not only a sweet falling bound to come and quickly go away.
Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance, albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking process attempts to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of logic and plausibility.
Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of destruction.
The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either.
Faith, in the having mode, is a crutch for those who want to be certain, those who want an answer to life without daring to search for it themselves. Faith, in the being mode, is not, in the first place, a belief in certain ideas, but an inner orientation; an attitude.