The sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily...
To be naive and easily deceived is impermissible, today more than ever, when the prevailing untruths may lead to a catastrophe because they blind people to real dangers and real possibilities.
To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but “information” alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it.
Obsessional work alone would drive people just as crazy as would complete laziness.
Know thyself” is one of the fundamental commands that aim at human strength and happiness.
Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being – and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being. In essence, all human beings are identical. We are all part of One; we are One.
Force is camouflaged by consents; the consent is brought about the methods of mass suggestion.
Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown.
The passion for having must lead to never-ending class war. The pretense of the communists that their system will end class struggle by abolishing classes is fiction, for their system is based on the principle of unlimited consumption as the goal of living. As long as everybody wants to have more, there must be formations of classes, there must be class war, and in global terms, there must be international war. Greed and peace preclude each other.
Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.
If the religious system does not correspond to the prevalent social character, if it conflicts with the social practice of life, it is only an ideology.
Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their “personality packages” and hope for a fair bargain.
The capacity to see and – equally so – blindness are not divisible. The critical faculty of the human mind is one: To believe one can be seeing internally but blind as far as the outside world is concerned is like saying that the light of a candle gives light only in one direction and not in all. The light of the candle is reason’s capacity for critical, penetrating, uncovering thought.
When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the past – and about the future only as far as that it is death.
Not only thinking and feeling are determined by man’s character structure but also his actions.
That human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and hence that a whole society can be sick, is an assumption which was made very explicitly by Freud, most extensively in his Civilization and Its Discontent.
Care, responsibility, respect and knowledge are mutually interdependent. They are a syndrome of attitudes which are to be found in the mature person; that is, in the person who develops his own powers productively, who only wants to have that which he has worked for, who has given up narcissistic dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, who has acquired humility based on the inner strength which only genuine productive activity can give.
It was the irrational doubt which springs from the isolation and powerlessness of an individual whose attitude toward the world is one of anxiety and hatred. This irrational doubt can never be cured by rational answers; it can only disappear if the individual becomes and integral part of a meaningful world.
To be concentrated means to live fully in the present, in the here and now, and not to think of the next thing to be done, while I am doing something right now.
A society whose members are helpless need idols.