Athens, Greece - 20071. “A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.”
2. “As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found--in himself.”
3. “Another error against which I want to caution is to ignore the spiritual and religious meaning and motivation of actually destructive and cruel acts. Let us consider one drastic example, the sacrifice of children, as it was practiced in Canaan at the time of the Hebrew conquest and in Carthage down to its destruction by the Romans, in the third century BC. Were these parents motivated by the destructive and cruel passion to kill their own children? Surely this is very unlikely. The story of Abraham's attempt to sacrifice Issac, a story meant to speak against sacrifice of children, movingly emphasizes Abraham's love for Issac; nevertheless Abraham does not waver in his decision to kill his son. Quite obviously we deal here with a religious motivation which is stronger than even the love for the child. The man in such a culture is completely devoted to his religious system, and he is not cruel, even though he appears so to a person outside this system. / It may help to see this point if we think of a modern phenomenon which can be compared with child sacrifice, that of war. Take the first World War. A mixture of economic interests, ambition, and vanity on the part of the leaders, and a good deal of blundering on all sides brought about the war. But once it had broken out (or even a little bit earlier), it became a "religious" phenomenon. The state, the nation, national honor, became the idols.... Surely they were loved by their parents. Yet, especially for those who were most deeply imbued with the traditional concepts, their love did not make them hesitate in sending their children to death, nor did the young ones who were going to die have any hesitation.... In the case of war, those who are responsible for it know what is going to happen, yet the power of the idols is greater than the power of love for their children.”
4. "Authority is not a quality one person ''has,'' in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him."
5. "By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts -- but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively."
6. "Conditions for creativity are
to be puzzled; to concentrate;
to accept conflict and tension;
to be born everyday;
to feel a sense of self."
7. “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”
8. "Dreams - A microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul."
9. “Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.”
10. “Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says "I need you because I love you."”
11. “In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”
12. “In our society emotions in general are discouraged....To be "emotional" has become synonymous with being unsound or unbalanced. By the acceptance of this standard the individual has become greatly weakened; his thinking is impoverished and flattened. On the other hand, since emotions cannot be completely killed, they must have their existence totally apart from the intellectual side of the personality; the result is the cheap and insincere sentimentality with which movies and popular songs feed millions of emotion-starved customers.”
13. "Integrity simple means not violating one's own identity."
14. “In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”
15. "Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted."
16. “Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.”
17. "Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self."
18. “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
19. “Man always dies before he is fully born.”
20. ”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.”
21. “Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against God's command.... From the standpoint of the Church, which represents authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom.”
22. “Man is the only animal for whom his existence is a problem which he has to solve.”
23. "Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity."
24. "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."
25. “Men are born equal but they are also born different.”
26. “Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.”
27. “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.”
28. "Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies."
29. "Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ''Patriotism'' is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by ''patriotism'' I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare -- never with its power over other nations. 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."
30. "Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much."
31. "Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man."
32. “Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.”
33. “The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.”
34. “The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become "Golems," they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.”
35. "The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind -- not the fiend or the sadist."
36. “The paradoxical - and tragic - situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most.”
37. “The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.”
38. "The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
39. “There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.”
40. “There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives to his life by the unfolding of his powers.”
41. “The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.”
42. "Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists.... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence."
43. "To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable."
44. "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."
45. “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 awake.”
46. "What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal."
47. ”Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.”
