Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.
There are many who feel consciously hopeful and unconsciously hopeless, and there are few for whom it is the other way around.
The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person and him of great joy is the difference between get and give.
The individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making.
We talk a great deal about Russia today, and I'm afraid that in twenty years, we and Russia will be more similar than different.
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
If the handbag could think, it would have a terrific inferiority feeling, because, not having been bought, it would feel useless.
The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.
Happiness today, I think, is for most people the satisfaction of the eternal suckling: to drink in more this, that, or the other.
We are concerned with things. We are concerned with success. We are concerned with money. We are concerned with instrumentalities.
Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.
In the dream, sheltered from the noise, the subject expressed a judgment much more on the mark than that manifested in wakefulness.
The fact is that the culture does not have only positive effects on our intellectual and moral functions but also negative effects.
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.
To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge.
The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.
For [Karl] Marx it is socialist society which realizes "concretely" the religious principles of equality, brotherly love, and freedom.
Happiness does not exclude sadness - if a person responds to life, he's sometimes happy and sometimes sad. What matters is he responds.
The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.
Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life
Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.
Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him.
The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology.
All men are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual.
The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.
Society must be organized in such a way that mans social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.
Our vitality, and the vitality of each nation, rests on the sincerity and depth of the faith in the ideas which it announces, or pronounces.
To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue - and not a vice - to love myself, since I am a human being too.
Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.
Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the same time the beginning of his freedom and the development of his reason.
Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.
Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
Independent of others and in concert with others, your main task in life is to do what you can best do and become what you can potentially be.
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.
I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.
To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
I would consider a socialism a mixture of the minimum of centralization necessary for a modern industrial state, and a maximum of decentralization.
We are all equal in the sense that no man must mean - must be - the means for the purposes of another man; but each individual is an end in itself.
Greedhas no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.
If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love.
The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.
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.
We substitute, or we rather hide, this fear of real intimacy by a superficial kind of friendliness, which is quite nice, but nevertheless, very shallow.
Happiness is a man's greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside.
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.