There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with tha...
We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are...
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Frequently, and not only in the popular usage, sadomasochism is confounded with love. Masochistic phenomena, especially, are looked upon as expressions of love. An attitude of complete self-denial for...
Existuje ještě jeden další rozdíl mezi logikou zjevného a skrytého vyprávění. Ve zjevném vyprávění existuje logická kauzální souvislost mezi vnějšími událostmi. Jonáš chce plout přes moře, protože chc...
Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man by necessity uncertain.
Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie - not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one's voice, one's gesture, one'...
It is the task of the science of man to arrive eventually at a correct description of what deserves to be called human nature. What has often been called human nature is but one of its many manifestat...
Was so imbued with the spirit of his culture that he could not go beyond certain limits which were set by it. These very limits became limitations for his understanding even of the sick individual; th...
Giving is the highest expression of potency.
The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Man always dies before he is fully born.
The task of the moral philosopher-thinker is to support and strengthen the voice of human conscience, to recognize what is good or what is bad for people, whether they are good or bad for society in a...
Freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that...
Das Wesentliche an der Existenz des Menschen ist ja, dass er sich über das Tierreich und seine instiktive Anpassung erhoben hat, dass er die Natur transzendiert hat, wenn er sie auch nie ganz verlässt...
But in many individuals in whom separateness is not relieved in other ways, the search for the sexual orgasm assumes a function which makes it not very different from alcoholism and drug addiction. It...