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.
If you do not smile, you are judged lacking in a ‘pleasing personality’ – and you need to have a pleasing personality if you want to sell your services, whether as a waitress, a salesman, or a physician.
In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.
On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man’s need for collective art and ritual.
The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula “I am we”; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an “individual,” existing apart from his group.
It is time to cease to argue about God, and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry.
We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
People seek a new orientation, a new philosophy, one which is centered on the priorities of life-physically and spiritually-and not on the priorities of death.
Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.
The criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one, valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.