The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.

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.

Happiness does not exclude sadness - if a person responds to life, he's sometimes happy and sometimes sad. What matters is he responds.

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

If we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals...We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities.

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.

If one admits that the influence of the outside world is essentially beneficial, the lack of such influence during sleep would tend to diminish the value of our dream activity so as to render it inferior to the mental activity that takes place when we are awake, when we are exposed to these beneficial influences of surrounding reality. But how can one say that the influence of reality is exclusively beneficial. Could it not also be damaging, and could its absence not give access to qualities superior to those that we have when awake?