💬 Quotes

"It is characteristic of a healthy society that it should be capable of combining a high degree of organization with a high degree of individual freedom, but this is an extremely difficult achievement."

"The impulses of the prophet and the artist are dangerous to established institutions, yet without them, societies stagnate and eventually decay. Wisdom consists in finding a framework within which these rare impulses can be tolerated and even encouraged."

"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."

"Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one 'object' of love."

"Hatred is a madness of the heart."

"In the marketing orientation man experiences himself as a commodity on the market, his value not as use value, but as exchange value."

"Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites. The selfish person does not love himself too much, but too little; in fact he hates himself."

"If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all."

"Reason is man's instrument for comprehending the world, for finding his way through it, whereas faith is man's instrument for an ultimate relatedness to another human being and to himself."

"You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you."

"If you are depressed, it is because you are choosing to be depressed."

"There is no such thing as stress in the world, only people thinking stressful thoughts."

"Guilt is the most useless of all the emotional zones. It keeps you immobilized in the present by worrying about something you did in the past."

"Approval-seeking is a habit that will destroy you if you let it, because it is impossible to live your life to please everyone else."

"Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone, the future is not guaranteed."

"The fundamental principles of our knowledge are not deduced from reasoning, but are the immediate gift of intuition, forming the very groundwork upon which all our subsequent reasoning must rest."

"Attention may be regarded as the most important of all our intellectual faculties; it is the spring which sets all the other powers in motion, and upon its degree and quality the perfection of our memory and judgment entirely depends."

"The laws of the human mind can only be discovered by an inductive process—by a careful and patient examination of particular facts, and by carefully distinguishing between the phenomena which are primitive and those which are the result of habit and education."

"Imagination is not merely a creative faculty that recombines past impressions; it is an active principle of sympathy and foresight that enables us to anticipate the consequences of human actions and to enter into the feelings of others."

"Language is not merely an instrument for the communication of thought, but an essential instrument of thought itself; without the aid of signs, our abstract ideas could neither be fixed nor reasoned upon with any degree of precision."