Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Happiness today, I think, is for most people the satisfaction of the eternal suckling: to drink in more this, that, or the other.

The most important things we talk about on Sundays are things to which we pay very little attention.

The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

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.