We should free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the...
We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.
To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith...
To be fully awake is the condition for not being bored, or being boring—and indeed, not to be bored or boring is one of the main conditions for loving. To be active in thought, feeling, with one's eye...
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love. If this were the case with any other activity, p...
The task of critique is not to denounce the ideals, but to show their transformation into ideologies, and to challenge the ideology in the name of the betrayed ideal
The source of irrational authority, on the other hand, is always power over people. This power can be physical or mental, it can be realistic or only relative in terms of the anxiety and helplessness...
The greater the sense of powerlessness and the greater lack of authentic will, the more grows either submission or an obsessional desire for satisfaction of one's whims and the insistence on arbitrari...
The failure of modern culture lies not in its principle of individualism, not in the idea that moral virtue is the same as the pursuit of self-interest, but in the deterioration of the meaning of self...
The common suffering is the alienation from oneself, from one’s fellow man, and from nature; the awareness that life runs out of one’s hand like sand, and that one will die without having lived; that...
The common element in both submission and domination is the symbiotic nature of relatedness. Both persons involved have lost their integrity and freedom; they live on each other and from each other, s...
The basic for any approach to self-transformation is an ever-increasing awareness of reality and the shedding of illusions.
The Jewish and particularly the Christian traditions have stressed the element of sin but have ignored the fact that it is the emancipation from the security of Paradise which is the basis for man’s t...
Selbst nach der Geburt unterscheidet sich das Kind kaum von dem, was es vor der Geburt war; es kann noch keinen Gegenstand erkennen, es ist sich seiner selbst und der Welt als etwas außerhalb von ihm...
Se amassi veramente una persona, amerei il mondo, amerei la vita. Se posso dire a un altro ti amo, devo essere in grado di dire, amo tutti in te, amo il mondo attraverso te, amo in te anche me stesso.
Primary bonds once severed cannot be mended; once paradise is lost, man cannot return to it. There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world:...
People are confused and unsure, they seek answers to guide them to joy, tranquillity, self-knowledge, salvationbut they also demand that it be easy to learn, that it require little or no effort, that...
One can only understand the power of the fear to be different, the fear to be only a few steps away from the herd, if one understands the depths of the need not to be separated.
Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this...
It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group.