The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
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.
The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
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.
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.
Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.
Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
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.
