It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.
Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.
An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling – it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.
If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being ‘asocial’ or ‘irrational’ in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of ‘unadjusted’ individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.
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.
The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
You have to stop in order to change direction.
Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.
Respect is not fear and awe; it…[is]the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.
Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.
When people can’t handle God any more, they turn to religion.
People do not see that the main question is not : “Am I loved?” which is to a large extent the question : “Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?” The main question is: “Can I love?
Love is the child of freedom, never that of domination.
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be. Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.
A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.
Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.
Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.
