To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.
The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it requires the capacity to be puzzled. Children still have the capacity to be puzzled.
In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child’s separation.
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
To be loved because of one’s merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this, or that – there is always a fear that love could disappear.
There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it.
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense of life.
Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.
Man is the only animal that can be bored.
The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.
Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
Love is the only way of knowledge, which in the act of union answers my quest. In the act of loving, of giving myself, in the act of penetrating the other person, I find myself, I discover myself, I discover us both, I discover man.
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.