Quote collection
426 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities and the connection that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable."
"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."
"Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others."
"Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you'll live as you've never lived before."
"If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?"
"Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want."
"Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self."
"There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail."
"The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is."
"In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child's separation."
"Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unite him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity."
"Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness."
"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."
"Freedom is the fundamental condition for any growth."
"In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God’s existence, God’s justice, God’s love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living."
"We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save."
"The spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself sufficiently against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon."
"Mother's love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there it is as if all the beauty had gone out of life."
"We may know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts we make, we do not know ourselves. We know our fellowman, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellowman is not a thing. The further we reach into the depths of our being, on someone else's being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us."
"Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve."