If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive.

To be content with the world as it is is to be dead.

Death is what takes place within us when we look upon others not as gift, blessing, or stimulus but as threat, danger, competition.

Religion is made up of unrestrained wishes.

If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive.

The more people anticipate the elimination of suffering the less strength they have actually to oppose it. Whoever deals with his personal suffering only in the way our society has taught him - through illusion, minimization, suppression, apathy - will deal with societal suffering in the same way.

There is no wrong suffering. There is imaginary, sham, feigned, simulated, pretended suffering. But the assertion that someone suffers for the right or wrong reason presupposes a divine, all-penetrating judgment able to distinguish historically obsolete forms of suffering from those in our time, instead of leaving this decision to the sufferers themselves.