Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
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.
There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.
Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three... The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.
Love and work, work and love... that’s all there is.
There is a powerful force within us, an un-illuminated part of the mind – separate from the conscious mind – that is constantly at work molding our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.
Religion is a universal obsessional neurosis.
Where id was, there ego shall be.
Remember: we all get what we tolerate. So stop tolerating excuses within yourself, limiting beliefs of the past, or half-assed or fearful states.
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her own life.
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement.