The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. |
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. |
The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis |
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal. |
There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail. |
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. |
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding of his powers. |
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives to his life by the unfolding of his powers. |
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself. |
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as "moral indignation," which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue |
To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable. |
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 |
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 |
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. |
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 |