The scars left from the child’s defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.
Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’
Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
Freedom does not mean license.
Love is a power which produces love.
The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual.
To be concentrated means to live fully in the present.
In the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.
Man always dies before he is fully born.
Man’s biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.
The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology.
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind – not the fiend or the sadist.
People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love, power, fame, revenge. Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent.