Modern man is assailed on every side and almost without interruption by noise - of the radio, of television, of headlines, of advertising and of the cinema - of which the greatest part, far from enlightening the mind, blunts and stultifies it.

The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense of life.

The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person and him of great joy is the difference between get and give.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.

We try to evade the question of existence with property, prestige, power, possession, production, fun, and, ultimately, by trying to forget that we- that I- exist. No matter how much he thinks of God or goes to church, or how much he believes in religious ideas , if he, the whole man, is deaf to the question of existence, if he does not have an answer to it, he is marking time, and he lives and dies like one of the million things he produces. He thinks of God, instead of experiencing God.

I think the Russians might do away with the terror in twenty or thirty or years, when they are richer, and when they don't need these repressive methods so much.